Rachel Jendrzejewski

Context, Synecdoche, Homonym, and Polyseme live in a house laden with clutter, but Etymology keeps bringing new deliveries for Context: a blank book, a conversation with the dentist, a key. Homonym and Polyseme sort and rearrange; they send what they can to the cloud (via helium balloon); occasionally they smuggle out old things, lost for years, and new things they know Context will never need. Synecdoche tries to hold it all together and sings. Meanwhile, Context wonders whether listening is work—if it is labor, if it matters, and if what matters (if it matters) can be retrieved from the ever-accumulating material of living. Meronymy is a kaleidoscopic, audiovisual performance-portrait of the technologies, ancient and modern, by which we cling to what we might otherwise forget. With wry tenderness and formal dexterity, Jendrzejewski builds a space in which to reckon with memory, loss, intrusion, and overflow amidst the cacophonic practice of living in language together.

PRAISE

"The page a meronym of the stage, Rachel Jendrzejewski carefully crafts language into a composition for live performance, full of movement and transformation, where the written word must be spoken, read out loud, embodied, acted out. This is theatre, full of life, alive."
- Virginia Grise

"In this incandescent crystal candy dish of a play, words and phases become objects to be reckoned with, cherished and released. The conversation with your dentist arrives in a box. Later, lists of words layer into a symphonic waterfall of pleasure and grief. Rachel Jendrzejewski daintily deconstructs the legacies of Mac Wellman, Gertrude Stein and Erik Ehn and laces them into her own unique form of, dare I say, musical theater? This play is a pleasure dome for all those who love language in all its loops and contradictions. Warning: you may find yourself googling 'what is the difference between synecdoche and metonymy' as a mysterious grin creeps across your face."
- Lisa D’Amour

"Rachel Jendrzejewski is toiling with a dream. Nomadic with her parts of speech, she wedges opera between syllables, she gifts readers a laboratory for language. In their making of a home--their reinvention of a home--Meronymy's characters are more like silhouettes. 'Grammar' courses its life from adolescence to the aged body and words become trinkets, shedding their syntactical thread. We drift into a tongue-tied universe, a blanket of snow, a flood of lace, where Jendrzejewski greets us as archivist. This is a play for those in transit. This is a play for those trying to remember."
- Lucas Baisch

"Slipping away from your grasp the second you think you've found them, Rachel's words lick out sharp like lace edge, flood in blue and white. A knock at the door of reconciliation, is context everything? This work testifies to the power of making do when language is an elusive love."
- Marcela Michelle

This play was originally developed through an experimental collaboration with installation artists Megan and Murray McMillan, composer Peter Bussigel, and five actors from the Brown/Trinity Consortium. MERONYMY is the text that emerged and continues to be re-imagined for different performative contexts. Megan and Murray’s large-scale installation and subsequent works reflecting on the collaborative process (a single-channel video, site-specific video installation, and series of photographs) have continued life under the title THE REMAINS OF SOMETHING WHOLE.

Phases of the moon mark the passing of time for two inhabitants of a remote, dreamlike farm. Lua and Dal alternately support and dismantle their co–created reality as they navigate the magical swells of their daily routine. Encyclopedia explores the beauty and uncertainty of relational complexity — how we trust, how we grieve, how we teeter on the edge of an uncertain consensus, and how we ultimately have only the thinness of our agreement with each other to construct and navigate reality. -Spout Press

An experimental rock opera on the life of Polish composer and statesman Ignacy Jan Paderewski, filtered through the lenses of 81 women. Commissioned by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw; developed in collaboration development with director Emily Mendelsohn, composers Chris Hepola and Jenna Wyse, and Tricklock Company.

Early Morning Song explores issues of mortality, legacy, and climate change. The piece revolves around an obscure female scientist who is engaged in the impossible task of archiving her entire life, despite her knowledge that our planet likely will not be habitable by human beings much longer. The central figure is performed by six women; and the script is deliberately spacious, toward leaving ample room for the contributions of each creative team that brings it to life.

This piece was conceived and developed in collaboration with Red Eye Theater, with support from the NEA and Playwrights' Center. Read more about the development process: http://redeyetheater.tumblr.com

Emerging from a densely layered collaboration between performers, audience, visual environment, and sound, IN WHICH _______ AND OTHERS DISCOVER THE END grapples with the current generation's collective, unconscious anxiety that the world may in the foreseeable future be uninhabitable for humans. Taking inspiration from scientific discoveries (the identification of a new knee ligament, a new class of mathematical shape, the previously unknown mating spot of the blue whale) that are continually updating what we think we know, IN WHICH... asks us to acknowledge that we live in a world of uncertainty through an expansive rumination on the ways we embody polarity, mystery, mortality, discovery, and change.

IN WHICH _______ AND OTHERS DISCOVER THE END originally was a collaboration between performance collective SuperGroup; experimental playwright Rachel Jendrzejewski; installation artist Liz Miller; art rock band Brute Heart; performers Angharad Davies, Hannah Kramer, and Stephanie Stoumbelis; lighting designer Heidi Eckwall; and process correspondent Hannah Geil-Neufeld.

The publication includes illustrations of the original performance, music notation, and a foreword by Lara D. Nielsen.

PRAISE

"Rachel Jendrzejewski & SuperGroup have the very difficult task of 'trying to tell a story with no chance of success'—that of the Earth's future and our own. In a story in which we may too easily succumb to helplessness or fear, this play takes a compassionate approach that examines our discomfort and calls us into 'running and jumping and recognizing each other.' Through dance, music, visual art, and a participatory audience, the performers seek to bring us back into conversation with our body, with other bodies, with the body of the Earth. A physical score for movement guides each potential iteration of this performance to allow for mourning, for embarrassment and admission, for growth. The piece is a celebration of our togetherness, an acknowledgment of all we do not know. Why even call it a performance? This is an act of living. 'You can take a minute to tune in. Listen.' And you should. Just long enough to awaken your body, awaken your voice."
—Abigail Zimmer

"This visionary, exemplary book feels like the lovechild of Caryl Churchill and Deborah Hay. A document that is at once a dance, a play, an epic poem and a graphic novel, it provides a new way of thinking through performance at the beginning of the end of the world."
—Miguel Gutierrez

"Words and image hover in a suspense of whimsy and joy, with the understanding that whimsy is also a form of mortal anxiety and theodicy is joy's visa. The printed event is spacious, generous, and playful—also beautifully instrumental in the ways it is framed and illuminated. One smells the Flapjacks of Creativity in the traces here of process: love, compassion and fellowship reading clearly. A process of making comes alive and provokes more making in responsive ripples.

Politically, the piece is clear eyed about rut peel parches and the squandering ooze, while ultimately praising the glory of dappled things in their dappling, dappling, dappling. Esthetically, here is smart, electric instress, recalling a strong inscape and calling for new.

Notes:
The document is a lake's capture of a leaf on its tension, and the delicate tremors radiant therefrom.
It is all highly personal.
There are ligaments."
—Erik Ehn

PASSION is a new multidisciplinary performance by Zoe Aja Moore and Rachel Jendrzejewski that invites audiences into a somatic experience rooted in the rehearsal of perseverance. Ignited by the iconic silent film THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC, which portrays the final hours of Joan’s trial and execution, the piece explores our contemporary climate crisis and creates a collective experience, arriving at an insistence that we must change. Commissioned by Los Angeles Performance Practice and currently in development.

Amber is 1/3 of THE HIVE PROJECT, which brings music and performance to bear on three short poetic dramas that straddle the boundaries between humans and bees. Engaging with philosophical issues linked to the long and rich history of human-bee interactions, these plays seek to shed light on those habits of thought that prevent us from responding adequately to the interlocking environmental crises of our time, such as the “hive-collapse” syndrome decimating bee populations world-wide. THE HIVE PROJECT was initiated by Padua Playwrights and also includes short pieces by Guy Zimmerman and Gray Palmer.

David sleeps and Abital dreams as the outside world incessantly rings. A fleeting portrait of calling and volition.

This collaboration between contemporary performance ensemble SuperGroup and experimental playwright Rachel Jendrzejewski explores the subtle changes that shape us as we navigate our seemingly contradictory needs for ritual and risk. Primarily drawing on movement and voice, the performance layers abstract and symbolic gestures with weaving narratives, multiplying patterns, and elusive signals to tell the complex story of everyday life.