Transfiguration: Lyena Strelkoff

It wasn’t really clear what had actually gone on in the room until Lyena Strelkoff saw the video of her performance.

You couldn’t even call it a performance. A loose compilation of journal entries, stories, and some questions from the audience. It wasn’t even memorized or rehearsed in the conventional sense. And she certainly didn’t notice what had happened while she was performing. But later she watched a video of the event.

“When I saw the video,” she said, “I was like ‘Oh my God,’ something is happening in the room. There was all this transformation. And the woman on stage - I had never see her before. I had never seen that version of myself.”

Several months before, Lyena had returned from Craig Hospital in Colorado where she had been for eight weeks, following the fall that left her paralyzed from the waist down.

The video she watched was of her onstage, telling her story to an audience of family, friends, colleagues, and strangers.

“I want to create a full-length polished piece from this,” she said, “but I didn’t know yet how to do it.”

* * *

An actress and a dancer, Strelkoff, studied musical theatre at University of California in Irvine, but it did not seem like a good fit, as she didn’t consider herself a strong enough singer.

However, while at Irvine she was one of a small group of students who were able to participate in a workshop with Polish theatre legend Jerzy Grotowski (see my previous post on him.)

“That workshop changed everything for me,” Strelkoff said. “It was like church in the form of theatre. It completely redirected my relationship to theatre and the work that I wanted to do. It was powerful stuff. It turned me away from any kind of commercial work. I now wanted to do work which felt transcendent.”

Lyena was accepted to audition for Grotowski’s work center, which was in Pontedera Italy. Just to be clear, this was not an audition to be in a play, for Grotowski was not doing plays. It was to be part of theatrical research, like a theatre lab. For those of you who do not know what an extraordinary opportunity this was, it was like being a painter and having a chance to be mentored by Picasso.

She was one of 25 international performers who auditioned. And after two days, Grotowski cut 17 of them, leaving Lyena and seven others. Those eight actors worked for the next three days. And when they accepted the final four, Lyena did not make the selection.

“It was devastating,” said Lyena. “It was my dream to train in this style of theatre and this way of working.”

It is a profound thing to be devastated. Lyena retired from theatre for years, searching for a place where she fit, insofar as she was certain that commercial theatre was not for her.

I met Lyena in 1998, somewhat by chance, when I was looking for someone to consult on movement for a Ziggurat Theatre Ensemble play called The Cure. (please see my previous post on that play.) Lyena said that she would only do that if she could be in it.

That sounded good to me.

Lyena was one of a trio of actors in that play with a lot of movement experience. Their backgrounds were all different and that is what added to the texture of the piece. For a piece that was chiefly movement, working with Lyena and those other actors was more than I could have hoped for. Because, when the actors are great, not only does it make the show great - but it makes the director look good.

If there was ever a non-commercial play, this was it. It was a play about faith healing which was done in a room in a church. It was created in such a way as to give the audience the impression of witnessing a real event and not watching a play.

*The Cure* by Ziggurat Theatre Ensemble, 1998. Lyena Srelkoff on the left.

“Coming out of Grotowski’s workshop and my training with Présences en Regard (where she studied in Paris), the movement work (in The Cure) was both familiar and extremely satisfying,” Lyena said. “For me, personally, movement is a potent doorway to spirit. So doing that movement work night after night fostered a relationship with the spirit of the piece, the spirit of the group.”

I had been interested in the spiritual aspect of theatre for years, so this was an ideal first collaboration.

Lyena Strelkoff (behind) and Jenny Woo (in front) in Ziggurat Theatre Ensemble’s *Red Thread,* 2002.

Lyena became a permanent part of the company, along with her now-husband Dean Purvis, and she acted in our plays over the next four years.

I cast Lyena as the protagonist in A Cult of Isis - a woman with a secret, being initiated into a cult. Sometime soon, I intend to write about Isis. But at this point suffice to say that the play consisted of performing the exact same event three times through three different points of view. It required Lyena to experience true, deep, painful emotion at precisely the same place in the script, three times. In one iteration she was speaking English. (like you would expect in a play. ) But another time she was not speaking English. And the third time she was not speaking at all. I can not stress how difficult this is to do. It actually seems impossible as I think back. Remarkably, Lyena did this unwaveringly at every performance.

I am reminded of one of George C. Scott’s college acting teachers who said, “George Scott could sweat on cue.”

Lyena Strelkoff as The Initiate with Isis (Dana Legawiec, behind) in Ziggurat Theatre Ensemble’s *A Cult of Isis*, 2001.

And then in 2002 the accident happened.

Lyena was 33 years old. She was visiting a park with Dean (on a date!) and she had climbed a tree, when the branch broke and she fell twenty-five feet. The impact shattered her 11th vertebra, crushing her spinal cord, and she immediately became paraplegic. She spent 10 days at UCLA medical center where she underwent surgery. Following that, she was at Craig Hospital for almost two months.

While at Craig, a therapist asked her to say how she got there. Lyena said, “And I told her a twenty-minute story.” When the story was finished the therapist said, “I’ve been doing this for eight years and no one has ever told me more than three sentences.” The therapist went on: “I know you’re in no position to hear this right now, but I see you telling these stories.”

Lyena was in no position to hear that. She could barely perform basic functions by herself.

“But she must had planted a seed,” Lyena said. “because eventually I felt, I have to tell these stories. Amazing things are happening here which I never would have dreamed of or imagined. I have to share what I’m living through.”

A few months later Lyena was on the Ziggurat Theatre stage with the performance that she videotaped.

It took months of dedicated writing to create a finished work. Lyena had never written a theatre piece before. But she was a theatre veteran, with taste and a talent for writing. And she had a story that needed telling - in all its pain, messy complexity, and wonderment.

The piece she created is called Caterpillar Soup. She premiered it in 2003 and, in its initial run in Los Angeles, it was extended five times. And she has performed it for years. Lyena explains the title.

“When instinct signals it’s time for transformation, a caterpillar excretes its own cocoon. But before it can begin to form wings, it must completely dissolve, becoming, in essence, caterpillar soup.”

It was thrilling to see Lyena in that show. Not just seeing it as something she created, but really for the first time having her lead us down the path that she had been traveling since the accident. Like all great pieces of theatre, even though her story is nothing like yours, you feel connected and she lets you share something.

It is the alchemy of a great performance.

In her show, Lyena tells her story and says many things that are hard for a person without paraplegia to wrap their mind around. The one that jumps out at me is this:

“The biggest surprise (of the paralysis) was how much better it made my life.”

She doesn’t speak, of course, for anyone else but herself.

“The fall showed me how precious my life really was and made me fierce about living it.”

Lyena reinvented herself as an inspirational speaker and storyteller and life coach, while remaining an artist. I hesitate writing “reinvented” because, in a way, she was always these things. She has crossed the country many times, sharing her story with thousands of people.

When I asked her if she felt the accident had changed her as an artist, she said this:

“I feel like the fall changed my DNA as a person, so it’s hard to imagine that my artistry somehow escaped unchanged. But I can’t say how it’s changed. Superficially, I lost my interest in fiction, wanting only to engage in stories of real life. Not necessarily only my stories, but real stories in any case. I guess what I have to say, how I want to say it, and what it’s for, have all changed. The fall was a very literal impact adjustment that knocked my inner channel into alignment. There is a self-possession in myself as artist that I didn’t have before, a kind of integrity of purpose, almost like a mandate - though I couldn’t name what that mandate is. But it exists now and has since virtually the very beginning, starting to surface while I was still in the hospital. The fall was an act of profound surrender, one that continues to this day. And every part of my being, including my artistry, is in service to that which flows through me. I could not be more grateful.”

Lyena Strelkoff at a speaking engagement.

Here is Lyena’s website if you want to learn more about her.