Thank you for visiting today.
It’s a fascinating and rewarding experiment for me, looking at my career in retrospect, far earlier than I ever would have anticipated, especially since my career still seems to be going full steam ahead, even in the doldrums of the current coronavirus pandemic. I’ve been relatively fortunate these days to have remained busy, engaged in multiple projects in development, live-streamed productions, cabarets, concerts, readings and recitals, all from the uncomfortable comfort of my home studio (also known, during non-COVID times as a second bedroom). It’s strange, even frightening to think that this may well be the future for up to the next two years, but it also occasions us to see it as one of those rare times when an opportunity is at hand to create new kinds of work and to reengage with audiences on a new and never-before-imagined level. I have no doubts that what we’re all experiencing in our industry will go down as a critical chapter in our lives.
If one’s career can be seen as a book, it’s nice to look back after a long time and see multiple volumes, each containing any number of chapters that record not only the plays and musicals and televisions shows and films I’ve been lucky enough to work on, but also at the changing themes that unite all of these volumes into a single narrative.
It’s interesting, sometimes reassuring, sometimes frustrating to look back at specific points in my career – credits on a resume, a random photograph, a link to a dimly remember news article or interview – and to be brought back to a vivid memory of how I felt then, or of how I feel about it now, or of someplace in between, a pivotal point where something occurred and to find that it’s still unresolved, not yet fulfilled, unfinished; in other words it’s a “something” that hasn’t yet become history – and what is a legacy if it’s not something that exists within an even greater history, something that is passed on as completed, something that’s no longer an active verb but a noun.
That’s the source of no little conflict as I build this site. As creative people, we are always challenged with remaining fluid, open and available to what any moment brings – to remaining an idea of something in action – the verb I refer to above. To do anything else is simply to build a database. Shaping that noun is a task I find as fruitless as I find it frustrating. Truth be told, I don’t want to be the one who tells you what my career may have meant to me or what it’s supposed to mean to anyone who might be tempted to follow me on the path of my career. I don’t want to do that work for other people. It’s why I feel that one’s legacy is best meant for someone else to define, like a well-told narrative that the individuals in the audience are supposed to unravel. If you do all the work for an audience, you’re taking them out of the creative equation: they become not participants in a singular experience but mere witnesses to a show. And that’s not interesting to me and is eventually fatal to the very idea of storytelling.
But – and there’s always a but –
if I can help that one person in the audience who might be so inclined to look back at Thom Sesma’s career without telling that person what it’s all supposed to mean in retrospect, then I think perhaps what I leave behind on these pages is less a precise map or a list of specific directions than some kind of lamp to light the way on any path of their own that they might be on.
That’s a roundabout way of saying this site dedicated to my career in retrospect – my “legacy” – is now and will remain a work in progress. In this latter phase of my career and, presumably, my life, looking back may serve to change the way i felt about those things that occurred back then, or even better, change the way I feel about things now.
Watch this space.
