Listening to Myrlie Evers-Williams speak at the Inauguration made me once again aware of why I've wanted to work with words for so long.
In planning the start of last year's season, or maybe end of the one before, I brought up working with diary pages in the context of the candid thoughts of youth, but it wasn't the right time for such a project. At the tail end of Mythos:Pathos, really as fodder for grants and something to put on paper for the next year's marketing materials, I threw the idea of turning words into a full-length performance again, and it took root. Moving forward with an equally motivated codirector, we decided we wanted to pursue text (both original and preexisting, anonymous and owned) and we would find it through community members and library books and other sources, and we would treat it with dance. A solid assortment of text-turned-dance would be a shot to capture who exactly we are.
Words are so important, even if they never become words. Words are progress. Words document, propel, and provide narrative to history. Words are birthed thought (yes, I'm still going!), opinion and communication. Words are protection and unfortunately sometimes weapons.
An important idea to me, personally, is how often words are forgotten or dissolve from our brains. The fables, myths and cautionary tales we read as kids are so often forgotten or discredited with adolescence. Advice from our parents, those things we never said we would do or allow again, our wedding vows- what falls by the wayside? A wonderful side-effect of this project is the amount of time we will be granted to meditate on words we might otherwise just read through; selecting text will be a vital task.
While Merli and I will be creating and merging segments together to form a larger show, I think my own focus will be selecting historic and contemporary texts and comparing them to original and personal pieces to find both difference and universality. This, as always, is bound to change and in need of specificity, but it's currently a nice way to think about time travel through words, thoughts and dance.
LOVE this! I love the image of "birthed thoughts," though it does make me worry... We're going to have one large-ass baby in 9 months, ha.
ReplyDeleteI also love the idea of timetravel through text and words from past to present. That sums up most of what I loved about my project through the Orchard House last spring. The opportunity to physically manifest that connection.
It's interesting, too, because while you are interested in words fading over time, I'm more currently thinking in terms of words we keep locked inside ourselves...the unbirthed words, I suppose. I've been drawn to the idea of interpersonal connection (or lack thereof) through text, voice, movement.
So excited by this entry!
Love it... words locked within the self..hmm... words unspoken, words unretrieved, repressed or surpressed, oppressed... words not encoded as words, words stored as images, emotion, perception, intuition, forebearing, forewarning, informing... reality represented by words that doesn't match each others reality due to what is linked to one's cognitions and what sticks in anothers.... AHH
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