ARTIST’S STATEMENT - UNDERWORLD

Drawing on Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run With Wolves , we performed a live-action re-telling of the Handless Maiden Tale, set then and now. Siting it at Old Union, a place of Spanish Colonial Architecture and early Jordan Starr notions (eugenics, economics, faster is better, competition) we sought to ask: what are the necessary major steps of human development symbolized by the myth? How might we replace Silicon Valley narratives with new stories of human development? We immersed the audience in these food, games, escape rooms, face-painting, storytelling, sing-alongs, dance, and music. We began by the courtyard fountain, came inside to the underground forest of the theatre, and ended under a giant redwood tree. Participants contributed paper leaves to a Celtic/Vedic Tree of Life banner after the play, answering: Who was I (before the play)? What Happened? Who am I now? Following Estes, we sought to use the power of story to help us reveal depths of ourselves to ourselves—and then share that out in community—for larger communal healing and expansion from the troubled parts of our Peninsular past of progress.

CON TE PARTIRO PROCESSIONAL

In this solo performance walk, my character wears the brown cloak of Donn, Celtic God of Death, and walks from a WW 2 battery tunnel onto the Golden Gate Bridge and halfway across to its high point—a typical spot for suicide. There I kneel, stand, then open my arms, my heart, and my inner sight to that great space high above the water—so pregnant with both life and death--featuring the skyline of San Francisco. Swinging an “acoustic censer,” emitting not smoke, but a continuous loop of Andrea Bocelli’s song, Con Te Partiro, I dance and swirl, walk, slow, and pause. I seek to explore this character’s odd fantasia, desiring to process through the crowded traffic of this famous bridge because it might be the only place his father might ever love him—a death-holding space. Is this where this middle-aged son and his diseased father might be able to actually see each other for the first time--something they were never able to do in life?

The song Con Te Partiro literally means I’ll depart with you. Clearly, it is about the big departure—from life to death. What profound internal lengths are we willing to go to be seen, to see each other across lifetimes?

ARTIST’S STATEMENT – FEELD PLAY

This project began with two questions: what is community? What happens when the earth goes silent? Across two semesters in two phases, our group of six actors and I devised a trans-historical dustbowl play, taking place then, and now. We made the stagecraft be the poetic—how could dialog, movement, scenes—most resemble music, in terms of spareness, repetition, motifs, rhythms, structures, dynamics, and silences? Our innovations included: a play that’s already begun as the audience comes in; a follow the leader, leaderless dance; a structure of nine scenes: the day begins/Wait, something’s wrong/ Oh, I think it’s… zzzzzzz. Resume. Using spare staging—chairs, a scarf—we reveal a story of a family of migrant farmers for whom the earth has gone silent—and the hidden, buried story of death in their past that has brought about their current drought and their endless unhappy wanderings.