Perspectives / Michael John Garcés   Director and playwright Michael John Garcés joined the Humana Festival in 2001 and 2002 to direct When the Sea Drowns in Sand and Finer Noble Gases. I forged two of the strongest and most meaningful artistic relationships in my career with playwrights Eduardo Machado and Adam Rapp at the Humana Festival, where I directed productions of their plays for the first time. Both of them are demanding, rigorous, challenging and immensely talented collaborators, and a director must be on top of his or her game in order to do their complex work justice. I learned a lot from both, and from the process of staging their (very different!) plays. And from the productions I've seen at the festival, this is the rule amongst the writers. I was a pretty young director the first time I worked at Humana, and really had to step up in ways that have made me confident that I had the capability of meeting almost any challenge, creative or practical. I think I really started thinking of myself as a professional director after the first time I did the festival; it was (and has been, and hopefully with continue to be) the proverbial "trial by fire." And at the same time, I believe that the work I've done in Louisville artistically is of the highest that I've achieved. In many ways, doing a show with a playwright you've never worked with before at the festival is daunting: the time is tight, the pressure is intense, and, of course, you are working on a play that has never been done before, so you don't really know what you have or how it works. But it does. There is a real spark that the atmosphere of intense work that the rehearsal rooms and the theatres at Actors are imbued with that is truly inspiring; the sense of a community of artists at work. In a way, working at the festival both highlights the intense loneliness of creating new work by putting it under a spotlight, and at the same time relieves the feeling of isolation one so often has by creating a context that is greater than any one play.