Bench Rest
My instagram is blowing up with bread. Sourdough is the new selfie, and loaves of various levels of sophistication and success now fill my feed. Evidently, we’ve become a nation of bakers, jars of starter perched on countertops, floury handprints marking our thighs.
There is a moment in the bread-making process that fascinates me. It is called the bench rest. When you’ve finished stretching and folding, and fermenting your dough, you tip it out onto your counter and roughly wrangle it into its approximate final shape. Then you let it rest. In this moment of pause, the gluten is supposed to relax, making it easier to finish forming it into a smooth, taut boule. Bread making is punctuated with many of these purposeful moments of inactivity. Sometimes you work your dough – slapping, folding, kneading – but mostly you let it sit, and while you are away it develops.
I have often thought about the importance of the pause, that is, the time when you walk away from a problem or a piece, and let it rest. As in bread, art also needs periods of productive inactivity. We’ve all had those moments during a creation process, when you reach the end of a day and a scene will not work, a phrase will not come clear, the image will not materialise. But returning to it the next morning, you find a way forward, a solution, or a new idea. This is why when I run dramaturgy workshops with artists and producers, I always insist that they take place over a minimum of two days. Even if it is two half days, and could have been crammed into one, it is important to leave a night in between. When I’m making my own work, I prefer short, intense creation periods spread out over one or two years – a concentrated kneading of ideas with lots of time for the thoughts and images to stretch and grow in between.
In this quarantine, I have struggled with the anxiety of inactivity. What to do when there is nothing to be done? Should I be live-streaming on Instagram, posting images of my previous work? Should I be writing a screenplay, pivoting to podcasts, retraining, up-skilling, or self-improving? If I haven’t made anything during this epidemic, will I be forgotten, or worse, will I have wasted my time? And what if I have no more desire than to bake bread, to sit in my garden, to enjoy my family? Is this a lack of ambition, an insufficient drive? Does the dough enjoy the bench rest, or is it worried about how it will get to the oven? I can’t speak for dough, and I don’t know for myself, but thus far I have learned that you cannot hurry yeast, and slow bread tastes better.
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