I believe in mystery, conjoinments of spirit with earth and life speaking in multiple forms. As humans we are but animals speaking in languages elevated by our ability to think in miraculously complex webs. Or not. Elevated by our ability to commit savagery in stunningly cruel webs. Or not. I believe in faith practiced not religion worn. I live in dichotomies and dualities that resonate in my head, muscles and soul. Life is scored by music soaring from my throat, an instrument, an orchestra, a band. Life is painted in palettes of color by days, years, decades. These multiplicities manifest in art interactions to read, perform and view.
My practice is an excavation, a search for women’s voices, those reverberating in other heads, expelled through other throats, as well as my own. I seek the lived truth versus what is taught, demanded, culturally expected and in some instances still required for acceptance in a patriarchal universe. My writing is rooted in feminine earth. Discoveries are made but answers are illusory, always provoking questions. Growing up in a culture of oral storytelling, everyday, down to the most mundane daily events, I see and hear my own stories first and foremost. My writing then speaks with multiple voices, telling these stories via written and shaped text, spoken word, vocalized sound, audio, video, dimensional objects and embodied performance.
As a playwright I focus on exploding canonical, patriarchal stories about women, especially over 50, honoring them by giving agency to their voices with my own imagination. I see plays in shapes. Women generally do not, cannot, live in undulating waves or discuss life, loves or crises in conversations or arguments plotted on pyramids. We live and speak in circles, spins, inversions, funnels, webs, weaves and flashes. Exploring these, I find the trajectory of my plays. A musician in youth, lyricism and rhythm often lace my text. Combined with aural, visual and textural elements that play critical storytelling roles, I strive to provoke internal and external questions, discussions and realizations, often using dual protagonists to speak the multiplicity of truths women navigate.
Solo writing is performative and hybrid, poetry that incorporates elements of prose and scripted dialogue as well as audio, video and visual elements to fit the journey of the piece. My actress and performer brain compels me to push the limits of text to perform on the page using physical shape and space, audio and video. Once I can stretch those limits no further, text grows beyond the page into live performance and/or installation. Accordingly, these poems live in interstitial spaces between page and speech, script and score, theatre and gallery, spaces that draw breath from the written word and simple gesture growing into being in collaboration, multiple lives. Many are explorations of self-ventriloquism – the dualities, multiplicities and unexplained silences underneath thick and thin layers of personal paint that don’t peel easily. Exposures and manipulations of the ever-changing face of my inner and exterior voices, my forward- and backward-looking view.
I make myself uncomfortable in this work. If you never go out on a limb, you always have an obstructed view.