There are Lions in My Woods

THERE ARE LIONS IN MY WOODS

Description

A 20 minute long fantasy story spoken and enacted by the performers who trade narration. The story incorporates images from earlier audio heard in “interview structure” with props and some singing.

Impulse/Goals

This branch of the work was driven by a desire to be playful, humorous, irreverent. The time spent with the earnestness and care of oral history work birthed an urgency to embrace a performative nature and an impulse to engage with audience. I was also struck by the images present in the maps and interviews of the dancers and wanted those images to become magical objects with a life of their own. I wanted to create something wild or exaggerated and felt it should either be a children’s story or a burlesque number. This desire came at the end of the research process and was a reaction to the process as a whole.

Process

Karinne designed a writing process to help us co-author a fictional set of stories based on the images that arose from those oral history interviews.

The dancers and I each wrote a short story as prompted by:

Shared inventory of images from all of the interviews (i.e. Flip Flops / Thyme / Driving in the Snow / Rose Oil / A Personal Tree / A Lion in the Woods)
Shared inventory of structural story elements that belong to fairy tales brought to us by Karinne on notecards (i.e. someone or something is trapped; perceived weakling who is a real hero; magic object; supernatural sighting or agent as call to adventure; something timeless intrudes on the story; insertion word magic secret key or hidden phrase)
Shared experience of the process and interviews

Karinne edited our stories together to create a long winding narrative. I spent subsequent rehearsals directing the verbal and physical staging of this edited narrative.

Questions

I am intrigued by the relationship between this last strand of exploration in relationship to the other areas of inquiry. For the audience who experienced this section during the showing, part of the pleasure was the riddle of uncovering information gleaned from earlier sections. The reappearance of elements that the audience had developed a relationship to was an important part of the experience in the context of the showing. Is that culmination important to retain as we move forward with development? Does the playful release of verification have more impact because we have honored that information earlier in the showing? One audience noted:

you got to know the personal mythologies of each of the dancers and then experience an invented fairytale with details that were almost like private jokes from the personal material that had come before. for me it was really exciting to feel let on something so personal and so playful the way you feel when you really do understand a private joke…

And another wrote:

I loved the last piece – a parabola, translating desire and fantasy into a question about existence and self-determination. It surprised me that there is not more theater/dance/performance like that employing language of voice and body in a traditional/historic story-telling way (even if it seems childish – but aren’t we all a bit childish…)

Moving forward I have questions about ratio/proportion of this style and also about sequence/order… does it have to be the ending?

I also want to note the importance of group chemistry, shared experience and witnessing authorship. Small example: Helen and Suzanne were witness to Scott’s interview by Eun Jung; Suzanne’s subsequent comments about Scott’s talk of the blue strawberry (she noted that his fixation on the one blue strawberry in a field of pink strawberries in his childhood wallpaper could have been a sign of feeling different from others) influenced Helen’s description of the forbidden magic berries in her fictional story. Scott later embodied the main character of Helen’s story with that information feeding his performance qualities.