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<pubDate>Sat, 24 Feb 2024 13:59:59 +0000</pubDate>
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<description><![CDATA[“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless […]
The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2024/02/24/finding-the-signals/">Finding the Signals</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com">Slow Muse - By Deborah Barlow</a>.
]]></description>
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<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/glass.jpg?w=697&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17404" srcset="https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/glass.jpg?w=639&ssl=1 639w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/glass.jpg?resize=300%2C194&ssl=1 300w" sizes="(max-width: 639px) 100vw, 639px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></figure>
“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you’re telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”
–Margaret Atwood
Sarah Polley included this quote as a voice over at the beginning of Stories We Tell, a film about her unexpectedly complex family of origin. Years later Polley would title her written memoir—so worth the read—with advice from the doctor who healed her from a severe concussion: Run Towards the Danger.  
There is utter chaos when a story is coming into form. Then to couple that with the admonition to run straight at what scares you most is an apt description of how a challenging narrative can eventually come into fullness. (It is also a good description of how a painting gets made.)
The challenge of assembling a story—one that feels like a “wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood”—while also facing what feels terrifying is evident in two Boston theatrical productions currently on view. In an unexpected coincidence, both center around the concept of gender, a topic so rife with complexities it could fill every venue in town and still not feel complete.
A.R.T.’s world premiere, Becoming a Man, is based on a memoir by P. Carl. In this very personal account of making a transition, the overarching question becomes, “When we change, can the people we love come with us?” After 50 years of living as a girl and a queer woman, of being in a loving marriage with a successful career, he decides to affirm his true gender. That decision brings everything—family, career, friendships—into a state of confusion.
P. Carl (played by Petey Gibson) find such joy in finally being called “sir,” watching sports with other men in a bar, having a body that finally feels right, going for a swim with the appropriate swimwear. His long-awaited euphoria in feeling “at home” is so tangible. But his past self, played by Stacey Raymond, is a constant presence. There is just no dodging the presence of his prior life.
Becoming a Man is told in short vignettes that highlight key moments in P. Carl’s life. Rather than taking a bildingsroman or “biopic” approach, this method of staging enables P. Carl to verbalize the cascade of complexities he encounters as his personal identity confronts cultural norms, relationships, expectations and the very nature of what is true.
P. Carl is a thinker, a philosopher, an inveterate question asker. Becoming a Man does not engage in the immersive storytelling modalities of traditional theater. Rather it is a deeply thoughtful dive into the social, political and personal ramifications of gender in the life of one human being. This is an evening of ideas, of social commentary, and expanding the scope of empathy.
It is fitting that Becoming a Man is having its world premiere at A.R.T. In the years since Diane Paulus took over as artistic director, she has been committed to bringing theater and audiences closer together. This often features programming that focuses particularly on social relevance. Appropriate to that intention, the audience is highly encouraged to stay for “Act II” of Becoming a Man where responses and questions can be shared and discussed.
In an optimal, “e) All of the above” world, there can and should be gatherings that take place in theaters where every form of social enlightenment and entertainment can happen. I am recommending Becoming a Man to everyone because the intelligence, honesty and compassion with which these issues are considered make this an unforgettable experience. It will be performing the Loeb Drama Center through March 10.
Across the river in Boston, John Proctor is the Villain is being produced by the Huntington Theater at the Calderwood Pavilion. Written by Kimberly Belflower, John Proctor is the Villain is a shot across the bow at that reliable standard bearer of high school curricula, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. What results is a play about a play, and one that leaves theatergoers with a permanently altered view of Miller’s classic.
Belflower is young, female and an educator. The play came into form as the first #MeToo allegations were surfacing. Belflower had also just finished reading The Witches, Stacy Schiff’s engrossing probe into what led to the mass hysteria and irrational accusations of witchcraft in 17th century Salem, with 400 people accused and 19 executed. When Belflower reread Miller’s play, she was astonished at how differently she perceived it from when she read it as a teenager. John Proctor is a villain, not a hero.
For years The Crucible has been used to introduce high school student to theater, social history, ideological distortions like Nazism and McCarthyism, and the importance of personal honor and integrity.  Belflower situates her story in a contemporary high school in a small rural Georgia town. A mostly female group of students is struggling with fundamental adolescent issues: making sense of their own personal identities, confronting the patriarchal culture of rural Christianity, considering who gets to speak and who can be trusted. They are also confronting the larger cultural context of #MeToo allegations and coming to terms with what constitutes sexual violence.
There’s a whole ongoing conversation about our culture’s complex views regarding adolescent females. Those attitudes–deeply embedded and often subliminal–play a significant role in both The Crucible and John Proctor is the Villain. It is however the complexity of that search for what is true in an individual life as well as in the culture as a whole that most poignantly provoked me.  Stacy Schiff probed a cultural phenomenon that took place 300 years ago in search for clues that could bring that tragic and irrational moment into a more comprehensive framework for our 21st century minds. Miller elicited his own a version of those events in 1953 when another contagion, McCarthyism, was roiling his present day reality. Belflower takes that storyline a step further.
In Belflower’s words:
“The play at its core is examining cycles, cycles of power cycles of abuse, how cycles of teaching The Crucible the same way over and over again leads to one right interpretation. It’s all about the way things get repeated. We’re seeing this happen in real time in our world. So in a lot of ways so much has changed, like with the whole pandemic. But also we’re right back where we were; so much is being undone.”
This process of getting to what is authentic feels so painfully slow. And now it is the sheer issue of directionality, not just the speed of change, that we must safeguard.
In a prior <a href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/12/07/the-history-of-our-future/">essay</a> I referenced the work of conceptual artist Dario Robleto. When he learned that the EEG and EKG recordings included on the Golden Record (sent into space in 1977) were made by a woman who was in love at the time, he asked the fundamental question: “Are we in our signals? Are we literally in there in such a way that the full experience of human subjectivity can be pulled out of the body, held in this other format, and be fully decipherable at a later date?”
We are, according to Atwood, still in the middle of this story—”a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood.” But the signals are in there, somewhere.
This terrific production of John Proctor is the Villain, directed by Margot Bordelon, is at the Huntington through March 10.
The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2024/02/24/finding-the-signals/">Finding the Signals</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com">Slow Muse - By Deborah Barlow</a>.
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">17403</post-id> </item>
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<title>Stories, Integrity and Horizontalities</title>
<link>https://www.slowmuse.com/2024/01/25/stories-integrity-and-horizontalities/</link>
<comments>https://www.slowmuse.com/2024/01/25/stories-integrity-and-horizontalities/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[deborahbarlow]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 25 Jan 2024 22:57:25 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Creativity]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Theater]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.slowmuse.com/?p=17393</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Slow Muse has been a personal repository for my thoughts and feelings about art, art making and creativity for almost 20 years. As the landscape of creativity has constantly changed, I have frequently been surprised by what persists and what does not. At this particular moment in time artistic expression has become increasingly politicized, then […]
The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2024/01/25/stories-integrity-and-horizontalities/">Stories, Integrity and Horizontalities</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com">Slow Muse - By Deborah Barlow</a>.
]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-large is-resized"><img src="https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/alice-childress.jpg?resize=406%2C625&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17394" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/alice-childress.jpg?w=288&ssl=1 288w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/alice-childress.jpg?resize=195%2C300&ssl=1 195w" sizes="(max-width: 406px) 100vw, 406px" data-recalc-dims="1" /><figcaption>Alice Childress, painted by Alice Neal (Photo: Victoria Miro Gallery)</figcaption></figure></div>
Slow Muse has been a personal repository for my thoughts and feelings about art, art making and creativity for almost 20 years. As the landscape of creativity has constantly changed, I have frequently been surprised by what persists and what does not.
At this particular moment in time artistic expression has become increasingly politicized, then often made into a subject of divisive disagreement. Responding to these circumstances, Rosanna Mclaughlin aptly captures the cultural snapshot: “We have become extremely adept at describing what must be dismantled, unlearned and problematised, yet almost completely useless when it comes to creating compelling visions of a better society.”
We all have ideas about what would make for a better world, even if those ideas are incidental, personal or small. What matters most right now—or so it seems to me—is not giving up. There is great value in continuing to converse, explore, examine, reevaluate, and in being willing to state openly what matters most to you.
Some consider this approach as “too little too late,” an insignificant response to a time of overwhelmingly bleakness. But I am by nature an optimist. My favorite answer to the question, “Is life getting worse or is it getting better?” was given to Laurie Anderson many years ago by John Cage:
“Of course it is getting better! It’s just that it is happening sooooo slowly.”
The following short essays consider three issues that have been on my mind lately, concerns that are focused on contemporary creative efforts. This is my way of continuing to talk, about what is happening in our world and what we want to change. Of course I am hopeful there is some resonance in this for you as well.
<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-large"><img src="https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/alicewalker.jpg?w=697&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17395" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/alicewalker.jpg?w=360&ssl=1 360w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/alicewalker.jpg?resize=300%2C300&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/alicewalker.jpg?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1 150w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/alicewalker.jpg?resize=144%2C144&ssl=1 144w" sizes="(max-width: 360px) 100vw, 360px" data-recalc-dims="1" /><figcaption>Alice Walker in 1992</figcaption></figure></div>
PART 1: IS THIS MY STORY TO TELL? 
In 1992, Alice Walker published Possessing the Secret of Joy. The novel tells the story of Tashi, an African woman who comes to the US from a fictional African country where female genital mutilation is practiced. Finding herself torn between her new identity as a Westerner and her cultural heritage, she chooses to return to her homeland for this procedure.
When Walker came through Boston to promote this book, she was already a celebrated author. A standing room only crowd gathered in a large auditorium at Boston University where she sat in the middle of the stage in an oversized armchair. Her sense of presence was staggeringly tangible.
After reading a few passages from the novel, Walker welcomed questions from the audience. The first to raise his hand was a well-dressed young man. Articulate and dignified, his accent suggesting he might be African.
His question for Walker was phrased carefully, but the intensity of his query was undeniable: “You may be of African heritage, but you are a Westerner. What gives you license to write a book about cultural practices and traditions that are not yours and that you cannot understand?”
Given today’s heightened concern about who has permission to tell a story–the controversies that occurred around the novel American Dirt and the painting of Emmett Till by Dana Schutz epitomize just how loaded this issue is—this may sound like a commonplace question to our 21st century ears. But in 1992, it was not.
Walker, full of gravitas and presence, addressed the young man with a deep, mellifluous voice.
“Let me tell you a story.”
Before she engaged in writing this book, Walker said, she had taken a trip to New Zealand. While she was visiting, she was invited to meet with a revered Māori chief.
“When I walked into his abode, the first thing he said to me was, ‘Do you know who you are traveling with?’”
Walker was perplexed by this question. But then the chief described to her what he could see: the spirits of hundreds of African women, hovering all around her.
“They lived difficult lives, and they are asking you to tell their stories,” he said.
Walker ended her account, and silence fell over the audience. The young man sat down quietly. After a moment the Q&A continued, with questions that did not veer far from the book’s text and narrative.
It was an astounding moment, one I have thought about many times. There’s nothing quite like Alice Walker sitting on a throne and sharing a very personal supernatural origin story.
Much has changed over the last 30 years. At this moment we are traversing particularly treacherous terrain regarding appropriation, how to voice the point of view of others, how to address a topic that is not part of our personal experience and/or heritage. Distinct driving lanes have been drawn across the tarmac. Pick yours, and then stay the hell out of mine.
But writers are imaginists. Where is the point when imagination spills over and becomes hurtful, inappropriate appropriation?
A good friend of mine, a white American woman, spent a great deal of time over the last 25 years working in Africa with disadvantaged women. She recently wrote a novel that takes place in the Africa she has come to know so well, a story of women surviving in the face of extraordinary challenges. When she shared her manuscript with her African colleagues, they praised her book with profound enthusiasm. Like the ghostly attendants the Māori chief saw hovering around Walker, these individuals were deeply grateful someone would be telling their story of suffering and survival.
When my friend circulated her manuscript to major publishers, the response was a consistent one: “This novel is good, and five years ago we would have been interested. But a well-educated white woman writing about Africa? We can’t touch that now.”
Whether Walker would be willing to openly share the origin story of Possessing the Secret of Joy today is hard to determine. She is a celebrity, and fame comes with privileges not available to the rest of us. But whether Walker would acknowledge it or not, that doesn’t change her story’s true source.
A number of famous writers have shared their “multidimensional” view of where a story comes from. Elizabeth Gilbert believes ideas have a life of their own. When she wasn’t able to write the book idea that originally came to her, it just moved on to her friend Ann Patchett, an occurrence she did not discover until much later. Isabel Allende has openly shared how stories come to her which she assumed were fiction, only to discover later that they were exact accounts of events that took place far from her purview.
It may be that we are in a pendulum swing that will return to a more evenhanded place regarding this question. Given the number of vectors moving us away from each other rather than closer together, it is hard to know how long that will take.
<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-large"><img src="https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/childress-larger.jpg?w=697&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17396" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/childress-larger.jpg?w=400&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/childress-larger.jpg?resize=273%2C300&ssl=1 273w" sizes="(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px" data-recalc-dims="1" /><figcaption>Alice Childress</figcaption></figure></div>
PART 2: ARTISTIC INTEGRITY
Now playing at Boston’s Lyric Stage, a terrific production of Trouble in Mind, a play written by Alice Childress in 1955. This “play within a play” addresses the complex difficulties facing African American performers working in a theater world defined by white money, power and taste. With a mixed cast of white and African American performers, the play draws heavily on the difficulties Childress encountered being an African American actor when there were few parts available for her. Childress also directed the off-Broadway production at the Greenwich Mews Theater that same year.
White producers pressured her to give the play a more upbeat ending. New to playwriting, Childress felt intimidated and reluctantly complied. She was particularly concerned about jeopardizing her fellow actors and crew.
So she capitulated. She provided an ending that suggested reconciliation and racial harmony, something she did not believe was at all realistic.
In reviewing the production, the New York Times praised her play as “a fresh, lively and cutting satire.” But the reviewer disliked the ending that had been forced on her. Childress deeply regretted having made that change, and she vowed she would never again compromise on issues of her artistic integrity.
That test came soon. When producers approached her about taking the play to Broadway, they requested additional changes to make it more appealing to mostly white theater goers. Childress would not agree to change to the happy ending they were looking for. As a result, the project was stalled and the move to Broadway never materialized. Had Childress agreed to their requests, she would have been the first African American woman playwright to have her work performed on a Broadway stage. That honor went to Lorraine Hansberry four years later with A Raisin in the Sun.
In 2021, Trouble in Mind finally made its long delayed debut on Broadway. When it did arrive, it did so with the ending Childress originally wrote.
The Roundabout Theatre Company’s production garnered four Tony Award nominations. In reviewing this production in the New York Times, Maya Phillips wrote, “Childress wouldn’t say she was writing for white audiences or Black audiences; she only wrote for herself, and she concerned herself first and foremost with the truth, whatever form that would take.”
Childress continued to write, but her career was greatly impacted by this pivotal decision. Her friend and anthologizer Kathy Perkins described her as a “woman of amazing integrity…She hated the saying ‘ahead of your time.’ Her thing was that people aren’t ahead of their time; they’re just choked during their time, they’re not allowed to do what they should be doing.”
Well said.
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/MER2017032918595906magic0207-1024x653-1.jpg?w=697&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17397" srcset="https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/MER2017032918595906magic0207-1024x653-1.jpg?w=1024&ssl=1 1024w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/MER2017032918595906magic0207-1024x653-1.jpg?resize=300%2C191&ssl=1 300w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/MER2017032918595906magic0207-1024x653-1.jpg?resize=768%2C490&ssl=1 768w" sizes="(max-width: 697px) 100vw, 697px" data-recalc-dims="1" /><figcaption>Loretta Greco (Photo: Paul Chinn)</figcaption></figure>
PART 3: GOING HORIZONTAL
The visual arts have a long history of gatekeeping. From the tradition of patronage to the hegemony of major galleries and museums, the choice of who will be seen, discussed and admired is made by powerbrokers. Rarely is that decision based solely on artistic merit. The market after all has its own concept of who will be an art star.
Dismantling long standing hierarchal structures doesn’t happen easily or quickly. Even so, there are many signs of artists moving away from the monolithic, single file line model. The pandemic ended up being an opportunity to open up new options where artists could take more control of how their work is seen and purchased. The hashtag campaign on Instagram, Artist Support Pledge (more about that <a href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2020/12/22/a-generosity-of-spirit/">here</a>) pop up galleries, artist collectives and online exhibits operate outside the existing structure. Even as art galleries, fairs and promotions have returned to operational, there is decidedly more legroom for the individual artist.
A similar both/and has happened in music as well, an industry where the star making machinery is highly tuned to serve a very small number of musicians.  Performers are claiming more artistic autonomy (most famously, Taylor Swift) while new venues and channels continue to emerge. How cool is it that my favorite band has two musicians who also happen to teach English literature at Exeter Academy as well as a wicked slide guitarist who is a Brahms scholar at UNH? (Check out Todd Hearon and his music making <a href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/08/26/todd-hearon-a-salmons-journey/">here</a>.)
That’s what I refer to as horizontality. Its finding new adjacencies, branching out in 360. That is a different approach than scrambling to climb the precariously vertical star-making scaffolding that can only support a few.
The theater community in Boston is also going through its own version of horizontality. In its 50th year of operation, the Lyric Stage is offering a season with more variation and excellence than I can remember. The Huntington Theater, another longstanding Boston institution, has exploded out of its prior identity with the high powered leadership of its new artistic director, Loretta Greco.  The programming is vibrant, unexpected and diverse, with several stages running concomitantly. Terrific major productions like The Lehman Trilogy (more <a href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/07/03/the-lehman-trilogy-and-the-ecosystem-of-ancillary-concerns">here</a>) and Prayer for the French Republic (more <a href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/09/19/more-than-just-out-or-in/">here</a>) have run alongside more intimate one person (mostly) performances like Richard Marsh’s Yippe Ki Yay, (a Die Hard parody no less!), and Stand Up if You’re Here Tonight, written by John Kolvenbach and performed by Jim Ortlieb.
Stand Up is currently being staged in a performance space three flights up that is accessed through a back alley doorway. Kolvenbach, a passionate lover of the power of theatrical experience, describes his particular passion: “I’m looking for a kind of obliteration of myself, and union with the play and communion with my audience mates and a loss of ego.” This work cries out with its desire to be participatory, personal and provisional, creating an experience that feels fresh and accessible to just about anyone. In keeping with that spirit of conjoining, the audience is invited to stay afterwards to share a drink and conversation with the cast and crew. While live jazz wafted, almost everyone chose to stay. (I found this quite amazing given how awkward programmed socializing can be!) Adjacency and horizontality can create those kinds of surprises, refreshingly so.
I have no predictions going forward. I’m mostly baffled by the ongoing drifts and currents in our cultural landscape. Mclaughlin, author of Double-Tracking: Studies in Duplicity, offers a good example of the intricate relationships we see being formed. She refers to double-tracking as “a state of mind born of an ambivalent relationship to privilege, that, when perfected allows those with financial resources the economic benefits of leaning right, and the cultural benefits of leaning left…To double-track is to be both: counter-cultural and establishment, rich and poor, Maldon Sea Salt of the earth. Pablo Picasso’s immortal words fill the scroll: ‘I want to live as a poor man, with lots of money.’”
Yes, there are many reasons to be baffled, but I’m also very grateful for those moments when lift off happens. Which it does, again and again.
The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2024/01/25/stories-integrity-and-horizontalities/">Stories, Integrity and Horizontalities</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com">Slow Muse - By Deborah Barlow</a>.
]]></content:encoded>
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">17393</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>Pell Lucy: GLANCE GANDER GAZE</title>
<link>https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/12/27/pell-lucy-glance-gander-gaze/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[deborahbarlow]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 27 Dec 2023 16:55:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Pell Lucy]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.slowmuse.com/?p=17387</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The latest online exhibit of the Pell Lucy artist collective is now on view on Artsy.net. Glance Gander Gaze explores the many modalities of seeing and looking. The curatorial statement for the show is included below. Stop in to explore an exceptional selection of work by Pell Lucy artists. You can also review the roster […]
The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/12/27/pell-lucy-glance-gander-gaze/">Pell Lucy: GLANCE GANDER GAZE</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com">Slow Muse - By Deborah Barlow</a>.
]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Chambers_06_spa-day.jpeg?fit=697%2C586&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17388" srcset="https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Chambers_06_spa-day.jpeg?w=1493&ssl=1 1493w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Chambers_06_spa-day.jpeg?resize=300%2C252&ssl=1 300w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Chambers_06_spa-day.jpeg?resize=1024%2C861&ssl=1 1024w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Chambers_06_spa-day.jpeg?resize=768%2C646&ssl=1 768w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Chambers_06_spa-day.jpeg?w=1394&ssl=1 1394w" sizes="(max-width: 697px) 100vw, 697px" /><figcaption>Spa day, by Leigh Anne Chambers</figcaption></figure>
The latest online exhibit of the Pell Lucy artist collective is now on view on Artsy.net. <a href="https://www.artsy.net/show/shim-art-network-pell-lucy-winter-2023-exhibition-glance-gander-gaze?sort=partner_show_position">Glance Gander Gaze</a> explores the many modalities of seeing and looking.
The curatorial statement for the show is included below. Stop in to explore an exceptional selection of work by Pell Lucy artists. You can also review the roster of artists in Pell Lucy on the collective’s <a href="https://www.pelllucy.com/">website.</a>
GLANCE GANDER GAZE
Over the last four years Pell Lucy artists have collectively explored ways to see, perceive and comprehend art. Even when an exhibit of their work appears in digital form, a quality viewing experience is the primary concern. In the words of Henry David Thoreau, “It’s not what you look at, it’s what you see.”
Perhaps that statement might also be expanded to include how we look as well.
Recent visual cognitive research has unveiled the intricate nature of the act of seeing. In
Western culture, heavily shaped by Cartesian dualism, emphasis has been placed on the gaze—a detached, analytical and objectifying manner of observing the world. This ocularcentrism relies on preconceived ideas to then scrutinize and assess, positioning the viewer distinctly outside the world being observed.
Freud highlighted “the blindness of the seeing eye,” addressing how the obvious often evades notice. Thoreau was aware of this problem as well: “Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray, i.e., we are not looking for it. So, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for.”
The limitations of the gaze have rendered it a derogatory term, evident in phrases like the “male gaze” or the “colonial gaze.” Other modes of visual perception are now being explored and considered. In his book, The World at a Glance, phenomenologist Edward Casey argues that glancing holds far more significance in human perception than previously imagined. He distinguishes between ocularcentrism–favoring the gaze–and visuocentricism, where no priority is given to the gaze over the glance.
Glancing is an instinctive, automatic action—a survival mechanism that continuously monitors our ever-changing surroundings. Unlike the detached nature of the gaze, glancing links us more intimately with the world we inhabit, collecting a wealth of information. Peripheral vision and bodily sensations are both acknowledged in this process. “Glancing discovers whole colonies of the to-be-seen world,” writes Casey. “Places where sight has never before been—or if it has, it now sees differently. The glance guides the eye as it comes to know the perceived world, leading it out of more staid and settled ways of looking.”
Gander occupies a middle ground between the glance and the gaze. It is a willingness to wander without intention, to explore what is often overlooked. Gandering can take us into disorientation, perplexity and the undiscovered. The benefits of letting the eye meander can be surprising.
Glancing, gandering, and gazing are visual perception skills. Used with intentionality, they expand and enrich the way we look and see. These skills also have great value to artists and to art making, enhancing that ongoing effort to bring something new into existence with a more “full spectrum” approach. For Pell Lucy artists who share a belief in the profound eloquence of images, this is yet another way to encounter the innate intelligence of form.
<figure class="wp-block-embed"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/movies/the-great-2023-streaming-movies-you-may-have-missed.html
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<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Weisberg_Zayin_4000.jpeg?w=697&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17389" srcset="https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Weisberg_Zayin_4000.jpeg?w=761&ssl=1 761w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Weisberg_Zayin_4000.jpeg?resize=223%2C300&ssl=1 223w" sizes="(max-width: 697px) 100vw, 697px" data-recalc-dims="1" /><figcaption>Zayin, by Deborah Weisberg</figcaption></figure>
The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/12/27/pell-lucy-glance-gander-gaze/">Pell Lucy: GLANCE GANDER GAZE</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com">Slow Muse - By Deborah Barlow</a>.
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">17387</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>The History of Our Future</title>
<link>https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/12/07/the-history-of-our-future/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[deborahbarlow]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Fri, 08 Dec 2023 00:48:27 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Theater]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.slowmuse.com/?p=17378</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The Golden Record consists of 115 analog-encoded photographs, greetings in 55 languages, a 12-minute montage of sounds on Earth and 90 minutes of music. J Marshall – Tribaleye Images / Alamy I am admittedly enamored with the idea that things possess dimensions that can’t be seen. Artists are particularly drawn to this idea, but I was […]
The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/12/07/the-history-of-our-future/">The History of Our Future</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com">Slow Muse - By Deborah Barlow</a>.
]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Golden-record.jpg?fit=697%2C367&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17379" srcset="https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Golden-record.jpg?w=2279&ssl=1 2279w, https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Golden-record.jpg?resize=300%2C158&ssl=1 300w, https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Golden-record.jpg?resize=1024%2C539&ssl=1 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Golden-record.jpg?resize=768%2C404&ssl=1 768w, https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Golden-record.jpg?resize=1536%2C809&ssl=1 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Golden-record.jpg?resize=2048%2C1078&ssl=1 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Golden-record.jpg?w=1394&ssl=1 1394w" sizes="(max-width: 697px) 100vw, 697px" /></figure>
The Golden Record consists of 115 analog-encoded photographs, greetings in 55 languages, a 12-minute montage of sounds on Earth and 90 minutes of music. J Marshall – Tribaleye Images / Alamy
I am admittedly enamored with the idea that things possess dimensions that can’t be seen. Artists are particularly drawn to this idea, but I was also raised in San Francisco in the 60s so there’s that too. Certain landscapes and places feel sacred to me. I have encountered objects that have taken on the energy of people who made them and/or loved them. I have been perennially delighted by Masaru Emoto’s beautiful images of water molecules whose crystalline structures have been instantaneously altered by exposure to human emotions and music.
These examples are actually not all that far from the concept of intergenerational connectedness—with ancestors as well as future progeny. This concept is being researched scientifically even though these new models are quite different from traditional genomics and DNA science. Epigenetics is mapping how life experiences can actually be transmitted from one generation to another, and then another. The implications of this research are so profound that a major revision may be needed of how we view and define our idea of the individual, sovereign self.
Some of these new discoveries are hard to grasp and comprehend. I am still scratching my head in amazement by the well documented claim that we are only conscious of 10% of what we are thinking and feeling. Clearly there is a lot more going on inside than those stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
Meanwhile the notion that we are experiencing much more information than we are consciously aware has a multitude of ramifications. Early research has focused on inherited trauma and its impact on mental health. But while trauma can be passed through generations, other qualities can as well, like resilience and optimism.  
While science probes how these experiences are transmitted through families and through societies, artists are making similar inquiries. As you might expect, they approach the material from a different point of view.
In his now iconic 1962 sci-fi film, La Jetée, Chris Marker explored the idea of a body-based capacity to time travel. Set in a post-nuclear war world where human life is being lived underground, one man’s vivid memory from childhood enables him to return to the past. That capacity makes it possible for him to also venture into the future where lifesaving technology can be accessed to save an imperiled civilization.
Miguel Valverde captures the essence of La Jetée well:
“This circle story of a man marked by an image of his childhood that is responsible for his travelling to the past only to see his own death is a photo-roman, a war story, a love story, a science-fiction film, an architectural construction and a painting of its time. It reveals the history of our future.” 
Conceptual and visual artist Dario Robleto is also interested in exploring what we don’t know is there, but is. In a recent presentation at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, Robleto discussed his ongoing passion for the Golden Record, an audio portrait of the planet assembled in 1977 and placed on board the Voyager spacecraft. One member of the project team, Ann Druyan, included a recording of her heart and brainwave activity.
While these recordings of her body were being made, Druyan meditated on the history of the earth and civilization. But she was also consumed with her new (and at the time, secret) love for fellow team member Carl Sagan. Druyan asked a profound question: if she recorded her brain waves with an electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiogram (EKG), could aliens eventually read her mind? As some have said, Druyan “snuck love on board the Voyager.”
Voyager 1 officially exited our solar system in 2012, crossing into interstellar space and taking Anne’s heartbeat of love with it. In his work that deals with this theme, Robleto asks a fundamental question: “Are we in our signals? Are we literally in there in such a way that the full experience of human subjectivity can be pulled out of the body, held in this other format, and be fully decipherable at a later date?” 
Ann Druyan’s own thoughts on the implications of the Golden Record are poetic and prophetic:
“We go from people who were imprisoned on this world for 4 billion years, never leaving it, to being beings who can send these little dandelion seeds into the cosmos.
Everything in the cosmos dies. Everything. That’s the lesson, that’s the lesson of life, of art, of science, of everything, is that all we have is now. But this now, which is jacketed by before, that 13.8 billion years before, and all that is to come, we’re here together, all of us right now, communicating with each other at the speed of light.
Why? Because our ancestors decided to create a chain of minds that could reach forward into the future, and husband that knowledge, maintain that knowledge so that we could learn how to connect with each other around this little planet and even into the cosmos. And that’s the wonder of it.”
Chris Marker, Dario Robleto and Ann Druyan have conducted imaginative journeys in the realms of space and the future. But there are also many personal and earthbound experiences that also touch into these experiences of connectivity and Druyan’s “chain of minds.”
One of the most common ways to experience this is by just looking backwards and probing ancestral storylines. Every family has its members who choose to leave the village or the tribe, the ones who want to start life in a new place. The immigrant experience is such a universal one, especially in North America, and many of us know our family’s immigration lore well.
My 19th century ancestors were English converts to Mormonism. They left everything behind to emigrate to the United States and then cross the country on foot in search of religious affinity in Utah. Because genealogical research is such a strong value in the Mormon culture, everyone in my extended family knows these accounts by heart. The courage and tenacity of these progenitors are held as key values in our identity as family members. Claiming to be from “pioneer stock” is a point of pride, whether by nature or nurture.
More recently, there is the immigration story of my daughter in law. Her parents came to New York in the 1970s to do their medical residencies, one from Korea and one from India. They met, they married, and they never returned to their homes.
A similar scenario and timeframe are captured in Lloyd Suh’s play, <a href="https://www.huntingtontheatre.org/whats-on/the-heart-sellers/">The Heart Sellers</a>, now being performed by the Huntington Theater. The title is a play on the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act of 1965, one that expanded US immigration for non-Europeans.
The play takes place on the afternoon of Thanksgiving in 1973. Two very young women, lonely and now estranged from their cultures and families, struggle with language and cultural differences to find companionship and commiseration with each other. Both have married doctors who have come to train in the United States. Luningning, now Luna, is from the Philippines. Hong Jae Ha, now Jane, is from Korea.
A play about two young women who spend an afternoon together in a 70s’ style apartment with Avocado Green and Harvest Gold decorative highlights? It does sound mundane, and describing it to anyone who hasn’t yet seen the play is difficult. But Suh’s writing is an enchantment, and the two performers, Jenna Agbayani and Judy Song, are spectacular. The Heart Sellers is actually an exquisite time capsule homage to Suh’s own heritage of Korean immigrants. And while it feels personal, it also feels deeply wise.
But it is difficult to describe. You just have to see the play for yourself.
Huntington Theater Artistic Director Loretta Greco does a good job: 
“Lloyd has turned his attention to how he might introduce the complicated and inextricably linked stories of ancestors…all with an eye towards excavating narrative gaps in order to reimagine and reclaim for a better more liberated future.
The Heart Sellers is perhaps Lloyd’s most personal play. It has his usual intellectual curiosity, big hearted humanity, comedic buoyancy and compositional grace—yet it is unique in that it is his most intimate.”
Like Ann Druyan’s love buried deep in her heartbeat and brainwaves, Suh is embedded in this play. His sensibilities as a writer and his understanding of the Asian American experience all hinge on his mother who made that brave initial journey.
These new ideas about how we are connected with our ancestors, our children, our planet and the universe are inchoate and just a bit mysterious.  And while that connectedness is often in background in the play, Suh takes a full spectrum approach in his writing. He has created two endearing and believable characters who must blend the unstated with the very practical demands of their lives.
Suh himself also appears to embrace a full spectrum too, both heaven and earth if you will. I was particularly moved to encounter his fierce defense of the decision to write this play in spite of current trends that assign strict ownership rights to certain stories. Suh cuts right through that argument with such clarity that I had to share it here.
“This is part of a conversation that’s happening in the American theater: how do you write outside your particular social location?
If you go into a project saying, ‘I’m going to write a play about immigrant women,’ and you are not an immigrant woman, then you are dead in the water. You’re in a lot of trouble. It’s not going to work. So you have to make it really, really personal. I never thought of this as ‘I’m writing a play about immigrant women.’ I thought of it as, ‘I am writing a play about my mother.’ Suddenly, you become the only person who can tell that story. You have to create the conditions where you are the only person who can write it. You have to make it yours.”
Your memory. Your heartbeat. Your story. And who can say where it will go and what it will mean.
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/The-Heart-Sellers-HTC-11-23-126-scaled-1.jpg?w=697&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17380" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/The-Heart-Sellers-HTC-11-23-126-scaled-1.jpg?w=1000&ssl=1 1000w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/The-Heart-Sellers-HTC-11-23-126-scaled-1.jpg?resize=300%2C200&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/The-Heart-Sellers-HTC-11-23-126-scaled-1.jpg?resize=768%2C512&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/The-Heart-Sellers-HTC-11-23-126-scaled-1.jpg?resize=330%2C220&ssl=1 330w" sizes="(max-width: 697px) 100vw, 697px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></figure>
The Heart Sellers, now playing at the Huntington Theater in Boston. Photograph: T Charles Erickson
The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/12/07/the-history-of-our-future/">The History of Our Future</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com">Slow Muse - By Deborah Barlow</a>.
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">17378</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>Strangers Meet</title>
<link>https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/11/23/strangers-meet/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[deborahbarlow]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 23 Nov 2023 14:22:08 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Theater]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.slowmuse.com/?p=17370</guid>
<description><![CDATA[At a time when things feel particularly frayed and fragile, finding a place of clarity and comfort is hard. Frequent reference has been made to the haunting the lines of W. B. Yeats’s 1919 poem, Second Coming: “The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” Every […]
The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/11/23/strangers-meet/">Strangers Meet</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com">Slow Muse - By Deborah Barlow</a>.
]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Smith.jpg?fit=697%2C393&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17372" srcset="https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Smith.jpg?w=1298&ssl=1 1298w, https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Smith.jpg?resize=300%2C169&ssl=1 300w, https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Smith.jpg?resize=1024%2C577&ssl=1 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Smith.jpg?resize=768%2C433&ssl=1 768w" sizes="(max-width: 697px) 100vw, 697px" /><figcaption>Tracy K. Smith (Photo: Victoria Smith) </figcaption></figure>
At a time when things feel particularly frayed and fragile, finding a place of clarity and comfort is hard. Frequent reference has been made to the haunting the lines of W. B. Yeats’s 1919 poem, Second Coming: “The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”
Every so often a thought or a conversation does help ventilate the airlessness that so many of us are feeling on the inside. Sometimes it is wisdom that is specific to the situation in the Middle East, like John Oliver‘s evenhanded “schooling” on the topic in a recent episode of Last Week Tonight. Several of Ezra Klein’s podcasts have also brought some sensemaking to this enervating, troubling topic.
Meanwhile wisdom about how to hold ourselves during times like these does show up. The artist Wangechi Mutu shared her own way of approaching her work:
“It’s such a difficult time to sit on this Earth when we know a lot of the things that are happening, a lot of lives are being lost, a lot of the people that we care for are in deep distress…When I make work I pray, I heal, I try to create medicine rather than poison.”
Wise words abound in a conversation with poet Tracy K. Smith on Miwa Messer’s podcast, <a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/poured-over-tracy-k-smith-on-to-free-the-captives/">Poured Over</a>. Smith is gifted, thoughtful, empathetic and wise. She doggedly believes in an essential human goodness, and her optimism is grounded in a deeper knowing than the superficial hopefulness that is bandied about. A comforting line from a Wendell Berry poem comes to mind: “Be joyful, though you’ve considered all the facts.”
Smith shares her belief that humans fundamentally want to make community with others, that we are wired to care about each other. “That’s what the whole story tradition is based on. Strangers meet. Things happen.”
She asserts that “we have to plug back into other sources, sources that we are familiar with and fluent in. Ones that assure us that we are courageous and generous. The work we have to do is work we know how to do.”
Her invocation to access those other sources feels aligned with a production now being staged at the Huntington Theater in Boston, <a href="https://www.huntingtontheatre.org/whats-on/the-bands-visit/?gclid=CjwKCAiAjfyqBhAsEiwA-UdzJGz5oDtZrYwuzLF30mwimXHqKa8BWAGsXVqJjw2TKn3RGAK0EhsbBhoCYcYQAvD_BwE">The Band’s Visit</a>. Based on an Israeli film from 2007 about Egyptian musicians stranded in a small desert town in Israel overnight, longstanding animosities between these two cultures get outdistanced by a larger impulse to connect.
Several years after the film was released, David Yazbek was approached about doing a staged musical version. Yazbek was well positioned to take on this task—his mother is Jewish and his father is Lebanese. This new staged version of The Band’s Visit (with a book by Itamar Moses) was a huge hit on Broadway, winning 10 Tony awards in 2017.
The Band’s Visit is not plot driven, and proudly so. This is a stance that has increasing support. In responding to the latest New York Film Festival, Beatrice Loayza wrote, “It’s time to take a stand against the tyranny of ‘story’…Auteurs conjure up moods and sensory experiences that show why the story isn’t always the thing.”
Moods and sensory experiences are much more the fare in this character-based drama. The intention to step out of a narrative driven theater experience is communicated clearly right from the start. The Band’s Visit begins with large text in three languages—Hebrew, Arabic and English—displayed on the back stage wall that releases the audience from high drama expectations:
“Once, not long ago, a group of musicians came to Israel from Egypt. 
You probably didn’t hear about it. It wasn’t very important.”
It is under the cover of “it wasn’t very important,” that the evening’s enchantments begin. The Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra has arrived in the Tel Aviv bus station, expecting to be met by an agent from the local Arab cultural organization. The band is scheduled to be in Petah Rikvah the next day where they will perform for the opening of an Arab cultural center. When no one shows up to meet them, they secure bus tickets on their own. Language barriers being what they are, the band mistakenly ends up in a small isolated desert town with a similar sounding name, Bet Hatikvah.
So begins a night of unexpected connections and commonalities between displaced Egyptian musicians and the residents of a small Israeli town.
Three groupings emerge over the 90 minutes. In these vignettes, individual Egyptians and Israelis find fragile points of connection with each other. Life losses are shared, disappointments acknowledged. As an ambient metaphor for patience and hope, a solitary “Telephone Guy” awaits a call from his beloved. For months he has dutifully attached himself to the village payphone. Equipped on stage with wheels like a hospital IV, the phone and the man slowly circumambulate the stage, a poignant symbol of longsuffering tenacity. Yes, there’s melancholy and sadness aplenty in this play. But there is also much to make us laugh and sympathize. Life’s moments of joy as well as suffering land on everyone regardless of race, religion or region.
This production, directed by Paul Daigneault, is a collaboration between the <a href="https://www.huntingtontheatre.org/">Huntington Theater</a> and <a href="https://speakeasystage.com/">SpeakEasy Stage</a>. The performances are high energy and professional, with a full cast of masterful actors/musicians. A special shout out to Jennifer Apple as Dina who is on fire every minute she is on stage.
Yazbek’s music is engagingly eclectic. It can stand strong on its own but is seamlessly blended into the flow of the production. The set design (Wilson Chin and Jimmy Stubbs) is also ingeniously fluid, well suited for the no frills, minimalist feel of the production.
An unexpected gesture of extravagance does erupt right at the end when the back stage wall disappears instantaneously to reveal the orchestra. Strings of festive lights appear out of nowhere, and the entire theater is transformed into a music festival party venue. This full house reveal, so unexpected and welcomed, makes for a fabulous exit high. That explosively joyous final scene is also a visceral reminder that circumstances, in the theater and in life, can change quickly, unexpectedly, significantly. And that’s a thought worth holding close.
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Bands_Visit_Promo_270-Edit-scaled-1.jpg?fit=683%2C1024&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17371" srcset="https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Bands_Visit_Promo_270-Edit-scaled-1.jpg?w=1024&ssl=1 1024w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Bands_Visit_Promo_270-Edit-scaled-1.jpg?resize=200%2C300&ssl=1 200w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Bands_Visit_Promo_270-Edit-scaled-1.jpg?resize=683%2C1024&ssl=1 683w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Bands_Visit_Promo_270-Edit-scaled-1.jpg?resize=768%2C1152&ssl=1 768w" sizes="(max-width: 697px) 100vw, 697px" /><figcaption>Tewfiq and Dina, in The Band’s Visit (Photo: Huntington Theater)</figcaption></figure>

The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/11/23/strangers-meet/">Strangers Meet</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com">Slow Muse - By Deborah Barlow</a>.
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">17370</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>How I Learned to Drive</title>
<link>https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/11/12/how-i-learned-to-drive/</link>
<comments>https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/11/12/how-i-learned-to-drive/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[deborahbarlow]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sun, 12 Nov 2023 13:13:18 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Theater]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.slowmuse.com/?p=17364</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Paula Vogel wrote the play, How I Learned to Drive, by staying up all night for two weeks. She had secured a theater residency in Juneau, but unforeseen circumstances caused her to arrive empty handed. As a result, she was highly aware of an obligation to produce something quickly. The long days of sunlight, the […]
The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/11/12/how-i-learned-to-drive/">How I Learned to Drive</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com">Slow Muse - By Deborah Barlow</a>.
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<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/paulavogel.jpg?w=697&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17365" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/paulavogel.jpg?w=800&ssl=1 800w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/paulavogel.jpg?resize=300%2C158&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/paulavogel.jpg?resize=768%2C403&ssl=1 768w" sizes="(max-width: 697px) 100vw, 697px" data-recalc-dims="1" /><figcaption>Paula Vogel, playwright</figcaption></figure>

Paula Vogel wrote the play, How I Learned to Drive, by staying up all night for two weeks. She had secured a theater residency in Juneau, but unforeseen circumstances caused her to arrive empty handed. As a result, she was highly aware of an obligation to produce something quickly. The long days of sunlight, the absence of distractions to be had in Juneau and her solitude all helped to get the job done.
The play explores the complicated relationship between a socially isolated pre-pubescent girl, L’il Bit, and her uncle, Peck. Written with a postmodern hand that deconstructs and rearranges both time and characters, the narrative thread is still direct, frank and painful. It is also a play that is empathetic and, unexpectedly, very funny. Vogel reels you into the story, told in fragments, then saves the strongest hit until the very end when you have become a bit more prepared for its harsh truth.
It is as if How I Learned to Drive just gushed itself into existence during those two weeks in Alaska.
The play was first performed Off Broadway in 1997. Many said it was ahead of its time. (The Village Voice featured the two stars of that first production, Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse, on its cover with the headline, “Theater Too Tough for Uptown.”) The next year the Monica Lewinsky scandal went public, and How I Learned to Drive won the Pulitzer Prize. A few years later, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church–the basis for the Oscar winning film Spotlight–was published by the investigative staff of the Boston Globe, also winning a Pulitzer. And as we all now know, the next 20 years brought a steady stream of revelations and exposures that reached a global tipping point when the 2006 #MeToo movement went viral in 2017.
Perhaps more than being ahead of its time, How I Learned to Drive was the harbinger of this tsunami of exposure about the sexual abuse of women, many of them children. In the words of Helen Shaw, if the play no longer seems groundbreaking it’s because How I Learned to Drive was “groundtilling.” A bumper crop of books, plays, films and commentaries have emerged from its soil.
Part of the play’s power is that it is not a simple story of victim and predator. L’il Bit and Peck have a complex relationship, and the play offers some understanding for a man who is, in fact, a child molester. Vogel has frequently referenced how influenced she was by reading Nabokov’s Lolita, exploring the “negative sympathy” she had for Humbert Humbert. She intended her own play to “get the audience to go along for a ride they wouldn’t ordinarily take, or don’t even know they’re taking.” Nothing is as it seems, and Vogel’s artistry in assembling a complexity of emotions is fundamental to the 30 year staying power of How I Learned to Drive. It still packs a gut punch in 2023.
<a href="https://www.actorsshakespeareproject.org/">Actors’ Shakespeare Project</a>, one of Boston’s most compelling theater companies (my review of their recent production of Taming of the Shrew is <a href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/09/30/stealing-bones/">here</a>) is currently staging the play at the Roberts Studio Theater at the Calderwood Pavilion. Directed by Elaine Vaan Hogue and starring Jennifer Rohn and Dennis Trainor Jr, along with Amy Griffin, Sarah Newhouse and Tommy Vines, this production is a “not to be missed” opportunity for Boston audiences to experience Vogel’s moving, minimalist, starkly honest play. It is so well done.
In her directorial commentary, Vaan Hogue references Sarah Polley’s recent memoir, Run Towards the Danger. (Personal note: This was one of the best books I read in 2023. I recommend it highly.) In her book, Polley–a gifted actor, director and writer–addresses her own encounters with sexual abuse and trauma. She willingly shares “the most dangerous stories of my life. The ones I have avoided, the ones I haven’t told, the ones that have kept me awake on countless nights.”
It wasn’t until several years after How I Learned to Drive was written that Vogel acknowledged that the story in the play was based on her own life. (Vogel’s mother had asked her to not say that it was autobiographical, so she had demurred to that request.) “Whenever women write autobiographically, we are told that we are confessional,” Vogel said. “No one says that about Sam Shepard, or David Mamet, or Eugene O’Neill.” For both Polley and Vogel, story sharing comes from a position of candor and strength. They bravely confront things people have been told to keep hidden, then they describe them as they really are.
Vogel continues:
“I didn’t go into this concerned with the forgiveness of that person [Peck is based on]. I went into this concerned with the forgiveness of myself. Because the truth is the children always feel culpable. And the structure of this is me getting to a point where I’m like, ‘You know what? You were a kid.’ That’s all I wanted, to get there and feel that. And have it be such a basic truth that my childhood self would accept it.”
Trauma is an increasing public concern. It is deep, complex and pervasive. As we come to know more about it and the damage it incurs, the social practices that obfuscate and bury the difficult stories are being broken down slowly. It is the deft hand of writers like Vogel and directors like Vaan Hogue that brings nuance, sensitivity and candidness to theatrical portrayals of these difficult realities.
How I Learned to Drive runs through November 25.
The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/11/12/how-i-learned-to-drive/">How I Learned to Drive</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com">Slow Muse - By Deborah Barlow</a>.
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">17364</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>Waltham Open Studios, 2023</title>
<link>https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/11/02/waltham-open-studios-2023/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[deborahbarlow]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 02 Nov 2023 14:30:24 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[On Exhibit]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.slowmuse.com/?p=17353</guid>
<description><![CDATA[For friends in the Boston area, Waltham Open Studios happens this weekend. Stop by! This is the third year I have participated in this long running tradition. I was surprised by how much I have enjoyed meeting new people who are interested in looking at and talking about art. Deborah Barlow 144 Moody Street Building […]
The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/11/02/waltham-open-studios-2023/">Waltham Open Studios, 2023</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com">Slow Muse - By Deborah Barlow</a>.
]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/IMG_20231021_112504_875-scaled.jpg?fit=697%2C812&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17357" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/IMG_20231021_112504_875-scaled.jpg?w=2198&ssl=1 2198w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/IMG_20231021_112504_875-scaled.jpg?resize=258%2C300&ssl=1 258w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/IMG_20231021_112504_875-scaled.jpg?resize=879%2C1024&ssl=1 879w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/IMG_20231021_112504_875-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C894&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/IMG_20231021_112504_875-scaled.jpg?resize=1319%2C1536&ssl=1 1319w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/IMG_20231021_112504_875-scaled.jpg?resize=1758%2C2048&ssl=1 1758w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/IMG_20231021_112504_875-scaled.jpg?w=1394&ssl=1 1394w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/IMG_20231021_112504_875-scaled.jpg?w=2091&ssl=1 2091w" sizes="(max-width: 697px) 100vw, 697px" /><figcaption>Studio in Waltham Mills, Waltham MA</figcaption></figure>
For friends in the Boston area, <a href="https://www.walthamopenstudios.org/">Waltham Open Studios</a> happens this weekend. Stop by!
This is the third year I have participated in this long running tradition. I was surprised by how much I have enjoyed meeting new people who are interested in looking at and talking about art.
Deborah Barlow
144 Moody Street
Building 18, Third floor
Waltham MA
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/WOS.jpg?w=697&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17358" srcset="https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/WOS.jpg?w=642&ssl=1 642w, https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/WOS.jpg?resize=191%2C300&ssl=1 191w" sizes="(max-width: 642px) 100vw, 642px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></figure>
<figure class="wp-block-image"><img alt=""/></figure>
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Moonover18.jpg?fit=697%2C733&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17355" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Moonover18.jpg?w=1200&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Moonover18.jpg?resize=285%2C300&ssl=1 285w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Moonover18.jpg?resize=974%2C1024&ssl=1 974w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Moonover18.jpg?resize=768%2C807&ssl=1 768w" sizes="(max-width: 697px) 100vw, 697px" /></figure>
Partial moon over Building 18, a mill building built in the 19th century along the Charles River.
The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/11/02/waltham-open-studios-2023/">Waltham Open Studios, 2023</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com">Slow Muse - By Deborah Barlow</a>.
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">17353</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>Stealing Bones</title>
<link>https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/09/30/stealing-bones/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[deborahbarlow]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sun, 01 Oct 2023 00:46:13 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Theater]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.slowmuse.com/?p=17343</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Kurt Vonnegut was famous for his conviction that all stories conform to very defined narrative shapes. He liked to chart out each storyline’s trajectory—he had about eight of them–and gave them names like “Man in Hole” and “Boy Meets Girl.” And now AI has demonstrated that these fundamental story forms are indeed legit–identifiable, indelible, ubiquitous. […]
The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/09/30/stealing-bones/">Stealing Bones</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com">Slow Muse - By Deborah Barlow</a>.
]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Shakespeare.jpg?w=697&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17344" srcset="https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Shakespeare.jpg?w=860&ssl=1 860w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Shakespeare.jpg?resize=300%2C180&ssl=1 300w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Shakespeare.jpg?resize=768%2C460&ssl=1 768w" sizes="(max-width: 697px) 100vw, 697px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></figure>
Kurt Vonnegut was famous for his conviction that all stories conform to very defined narrative shapes. He liked to chart out each storyline’s trajectory—he had about eight of them–and gave them names like “Man in Hole” and “Boy Meets Girl.”
And now AI has demonstrated that these fundamental story forms are indeed legit–identifiable, indelible, ubiquitous. It also appears that storytelling runs deep in us, even more essential than the impact of where we have lived or when, or what our cultural traditions may have been.
The universal appeal of William Shakespeare over the last 400 years may be related to this taxonomy. But while it may be possible to chart and name the storyline template for each play, that does not fully explain why Shakespeare—more than any other writer—is so relentlessly adapted, altered, reconfigured, reconsidered. Even with all that wear and tear over the centuries, Shakespeare’s plays can still keep offering new ways to express and explore contemporary concerns. As long as we humans are on this planet, I’m pretty certain he’ll be with us.
Two productions on view in Boston this week have links with the Bard.
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Fat-Ham.jpg?fit=697%2C495&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17345" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Fat-Ham.jpg?w=1691&ssl=1 1691w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Fat-Ham.jpg?resize=300%2C213&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Fat-Ham.jpg?resize=1024%2C727&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Fat-Ham.jpg?resize=768%2C545&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Fat-Ham.jpg?resize=1536%2C1090&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Fat-Ham.jpg?w=1394&ssl=1 1394w" sizes="(max-width: 697px) 100vw, 697px" /><figcaption>Fat Ham, at the Huntington Theater (Photo: Huntington Theater)</figcaption></figure>
Fat Ham is not an adaptation per se but might be more appropriately described as “Shakespeare-infused.” Written by James Ijames (and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2022,) Fat Ham is at the Huntington Theater’s Calderwood theater through October 29.
The play is set in a backyard barbecue somewhere in the south. Juicy the protagonist—Ijames calls him “a kinda Hamlet”—is young, black, queer, out of step with his family, taking online courses towards a degree in human resources (what a great trope—studying humans without having any contact with them!) Juicy’s father, in prison when he was murdered, has now appeared as a ghost asking for revenge on Juicy’s uncle—now married to Juicy’s mother—who made the arrangements for his father to be shivved.
A familiar storyline. And yet not.
From Maya Philips’ review of Fat Ham on Broadway earlier this year:
“So many playwrights and directors try to find the spaces in Shakespeare’s texts that they can squeeze into, strong-arming their personal sensibilities and contemporary politics into some of Shakespeare’s best-known speeches and scenes. Ijames does the opposite in ‘Fat Ham’; he steals the bones of the original and sloughs off the excess like the fatty bits on a slab of meat. He crafts his own story and then within it makes space for Shakespeare again.”
Most of the characters in Fat Ham have their parallels in Hamlet. But the linkages are loose, as is the throughline in the two plays. Ijames pivots from Shakespeare’s tale of revenge to a story about toxic masculinity, homophobia and gender roles. There are tragic elements in Fat Ham, but the play is full of soulful humor, joy and redemptive catharsis. “The play cracks open into a celebration of the feminine,” Ijames said. Unlike the catastrophic final scene of Hamlet, Fat Ham ends in celebration. While it may have been inspired by a classical tragedy, it doesn’t have to end like one.
The cast is a terrific ensemble of body types and personas. All of the performers are all at their best when they are in motion, dancing and gesticulating. The somber solipsism of Hamlet isn’t a fit with the kinetic energy of these characters. And even though there are a few early blips in the pacing of the play, director Steve Walker-Webb brings it all home for an unforgettable finale.
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Taming.jpg?fit=697%2C466&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17346" srcset="https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Taming.jpg?w=1796&ssl=1 1796w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Taming.jpg?resize=300%2C200&ssl=1 300w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Taming.jpg?resize=1024%2C684&ssl=1 1024w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Taming.jpg?resize=768%2C513&ssl=1 768w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Taming.jpg?resize=1536%2C1026&ssl=1 1536w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Taming.jpg?resize=330%2C220&ssl=1 330w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Taming.jpg?w=1394&ssl=1 1394w" sizes="(max-width: 697px) 100vw, 697px" /><figcaption>Taming of the Shrew, Actors’ Shakespeare Project (Photo: ASP) </figcaption></figure>
Meanwhile Taming of the Shrew–arguably the most problematic of Shakespeare’s plays for modern audiences–is being produced by the Actor’s Shakespeare Project at the Modern Theater. Unlike Fat Ham, this production is an adaptation (albeit a wild one) of the Shakespeare play.
Director Christopher V. Edwards is well aware of the treacherous waters he must navigate in order to stage Shrew for today’s audiences:
“In 2023 it is a challenge to explore a play that deals with the subjugation of a female character reviled by men as a “shrew” because she is aggressive, vocal, and sometimes violent. So the bigger question is, why do this play now? For me, it is simple. The reality of the world outside these theater doors breathes necessity and urgency into this script. Our culture’s toxic masculinity harms every single one of us—not just women and non-binary folks, but men as well. As some fight for a brighter and more inclusive future, many others still cling to an idea of an imagined past to which we should be striving to return. And as many—mostly cis white men—fight to cling to this ‘glorious past,’ perspectives from disenfranchised populations tend to be forgotten or outright rejected.”
The Taming of the Shrew is actually a play within a play, even though most productions choose not to frame it that way. In the 1631 quarto version of this play, action begins with an intoxicated and badly behaved Christopher Sly being thrown out of a bar. A wealthy lord encounters him and then enlists his men to trick Sly into thinking he is an aristocrat. It is the lord’s men who actually perform this play within a play. When viewed in this frame, it is actually a story about two kinds of taming—the taming of Kate as well as the taming of Sly.
Edward’s version is set in the 1970s. His Sly is an unapologetically misogynistic man. He is drugged by a group of women (who have had enough of his shenanigans) and then he is led to believe he is a woman named Kate. This is all conceived as a way to teach a bad man a lesson.
The rest of the casting is all female. Women playing men do so as exaggerated caricatures of toxic males, outfitted in painfully unattractive polyester plaid clothing. Ouch.
The ensemble of performers is high energy, zany and very engaging. Does this gender swapped production succeed in dispelling our discomfort with this play? Yes and no. But like all good directors, Edwards offers us another way to consider this work.
It is tricky business. Julie Taymor, a film and stage director who has also done this play, had this to say about Shakespeare’s Shrew:
“He actually wrote a play about the unmarriageable, or the undesirable. It’s not about the beautiful princess or the lovely daughter. I think that’s astounding.
It’s the way it is, so it’s good that we show it, and talk about it. A loudmouth woman with a strong opinion is still considered a shrew in our society…this a play about a woman who has said, ‘I am not going to go with the flow.’”
Both Fat Ham and Taming of the Shrew have been staged to confront social issues that are third rail radioactive in our contemporary landscape. With these issues being so loaded at this moment in time, both productions made the decision to break the fourth wall and engage with the audience directly. When done with care (and not as a form of manipulation or pandering,) this can open up a powerful connection between the play and the audience.
Throughout Fat Ham, characters periodically turn to the audience for sympathy and support. (On the night I was there, the audience was thrilled to be the whoop whoop cheer track for all their favorite causes.) In Shrew, Edwards employed an ingeniously simple device to delineate between the public play and the performer’s private point of view: small red clown noses. When the nose is on an actor’s face, they are in the play. When it is taken off, the commentary is personal (and often closely aligned with what the audience is also thinking.) These nose-off asides serve as meta text, a kind of chyron that reiterates just how absurd this long standing, deep-seated misogyny actually is. The story is being told in tandem tracks.
This playful disregard for the fourth wall—which both of these productions do with great success—introduces a different kind of theatrical experience. The audiences at both performances I attended were jacked and ready to applaud–for a young man who finally claims his true identity, or to jeer at a clueless man about his unconscionable behavior. Rather than being constrained by the traditional division between stage and audience, these theatergoers have become complicit, stepping in to serve as a chorus of support.
This “we see all of you there in the audience” style of theater making is most effective when the play being performed is a familiar one. And who better than Shakespeare to provide the common ground—those good bones–for some wildly inventive and highly relevant theatrical romps.
The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/09/30/stealing-bones/">Stealing Bones</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com">Slow Muse - By Deborah Barlow</a>.
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">17343</post-id> </item>
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<title>More Than Just Out or In</title>
<link>https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/09/19/more-than-just-out-or-in/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[deborahbarlow]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 19 Sep 2023 12:46:38 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Theater]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.slowmuse.com/?p=17332</guid>
<description><![CDATA[“A cartographic conception is very distinct from the archaeological conception… The latter establishes a profound link between the unconscious and memory: it is a memorial, commemorative, or monumental conception…Maps, on the contrary, are superimposed in such a way that each map finds itself modified in the following map, rather than finding its origin in the […]
The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/09/19/more-than-just-out-or-in/">More Than Just Out or In</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com">Slow Muse - By Deborah Barlow</a>.
]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
“A cartographic conception is very distinct from the archaeological conception… The latter establishes a profound link between the unconscious and memory: it is a memorial, commemorative, or monumental conception…Maps, on the contrary, are superimposed in such a way that each map finds itself modified in the following map, rather than finding its origin in the preceding one: from one map to the next, it is not a matter of searching for an original, but of evaluating displacements. Every map is a redistribution of impasses and breakthroughs, of thresholds and enclosures.”
–Gilles Deleuze
.
I have often thought of thinking styles as either a tendency towards the horizontal or the vertical: to expand out and cover a lot of territory, or to stay tightly focused on a particular realm, digging down to understand it thoroughly. This passage by Deleuze—a thinker/writer well known for his layered, complex and omnivalent viewpoints—fleshes out my two dimensional, “go out or go in” model to a more full-bodied and three dimensional one. Much more than a thinking style, these are orientations that can apply to many other domains.
I had this model in mind when I attended three theatrical productions now running in Boston. Deleuze’s taxonomy offers a rich way to consider how a story is assembled, why it sometimes works , why it sometimes does not. Where is the story sourced? What is its directional energy? Where does it want us to go? There’s much to consider than just out or in.
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Prayer.jpg?fit=697%2C372&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17334" srcset="https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Prayer.jpg?w=2250&ssl=1 2250w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Prayer.jpg?resize=300%2C160&ssl=1 300w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Prayer.jpg?resize=1024%2C546&ssl=1 1024w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Prayer.jpg?resize=768%2C410&ssl=1 768w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Prayer.jpg?resize=1536%2C819&ssl=1 1536w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Prayer.jpg?resize=2048%2C1092&ssl=1 2048w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Prayer.jpg?w=1394&ssl=1 1394w" sizes="(max-width: 697px) 100vw, 697px" /><figcaption>Prayer for the French Republic, Huntington Theater (Photo: T Charles Erickson)</figcaption></figure>
PRAYER FOR THE FRENCH REPUBLIC
Written by Joshua Harmon
Directed by Loretta Greco
Huntington Theater Company
Through October 8
This play is built around a multi-generational Jewish family living in Paris as each member considers what safety and belonging means to them. Playwright Joshua Harmon, (is he really only 40 years old?) steps fearlessly into a whole range of “radioactive” issues–Judaism, the nation of Israel, identity, nationalism, loyalty, family, lineage, self preservation. One of his characters, daughter Elodie, is the rapid fire voice articulating the Churchillian “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” that is the history of Jews in the Western world.
Prayer shares a shelf with several other prize-winning plays about multigenerational Jewish families: Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt, the Huntington’s recently produced The Lehman Trilogy, among others. (Harmon won the Outer Critics Circle Award and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play in 2022.) And that form has been shown to be a worthy vessel for concerns that are both interior as well as exterior.
Prayer operates in both of Deleuze’s domains. The vertical/archaeological axis is a necessary element for a story full of the deeply personal, of collective memory, of asking what is and should be memorialized. Prayer is also horizontal/cartographic in its treatment of the ever morphing saga of the Jews as they take up residence, become marginalized, then are driven out. Safe harbor is found and lost, then found and lost again. Deleuze’s concept of “mapping”—a stand in here for storytelling—aptly describes that oft-repeated story: “it is not a matter of searching for an original, but of evaluating displacements. Every map is a redistribution of impasses and breakthroughs, of thresholds and enclosures.” Prayer confronts deep history, tribal memory, present day displacements.
The Huntington production is so well done. An outstanding cast offers a great showcase for new Artistic Director Loretta Greco’s directorial skills. The play will be on Broadway in January, but this Boston version is so worth seeing.
.
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Jason-Bowen-Kelley-Curran-and-Michael-Laurence-in-New-York-Theatre-Workshops-THE-HALF-GOD-OF-RAINFALL-Photo-by-Joan-Marcus-scaled.jpeg?fit=697%2C498&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17335" srcset="https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Jason-Bowen-Kelley-Curran-and-Michael-Laurence-in-New-York-Theatre-Workshops-THE-HALF-GOD-OF-RAINFALL-Photo-by-Joan-Marcus-scaled.jpeg?w=2560&ssl=1 2560w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Jason-Bowen-Kelley-Curran-and-Michael-Laurence-in-New-York-Theatre-Workshops-THE-HALF-GOD-OF-RAINFALL-Photo-by-Joan-Marcus-scaled.jpeg?resize=300%2C214&ssl=1 300w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Jason-Bowen-Kelley-Curran-and-Michael-Laurence-in-New-York-Theatre-Workshops-THE-HALF-GOD-OF-RAINFALL-Photo-by-Joan-Marcus-scaled.jpeg?resize=1024%2C732&ssl=1 1024w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Jason-Bowen-Kelley-Curran-and-Michael-Laurence-in-New-York-Theatre-Workshops-THE-HALF-GOD-OF-RAINFALL-Photo-by-Joan-Marcus-scaled.jpeg?resize=768%2C549&ssl=1 768w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Jason-Bowen-Kelley-Curran-and-Michael-Laurence-in-New-York-Theatre-Workshops-THE-HALF-GOD-OF-RAINFALL-Photo-by-Joan-Marcus-scaled.jpeg?resize=1536%2C1098&ssl=1 1536w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Jason-Bowen-Kelley-Curran-and-Michael-Laurence-in-New-York-Theatre-Workshops-THE-HALF-GOD-OF-RAINFALL-Photo-by-Joan-Marcus-scaled.jpeg?resize=2048%2C1464&ssl=1 2048w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Jason-Bowen-Kelley-Curran-and-Michael-Laurence-in-New-York-Theatre-Workshops-THE-HALF-GOD-OF-RAINFALL-Photo-by-Joan-Marcus-scaled.jpeg?w=1394&ssl=1 1394w" sizes="(max-width: 697px) 100vw, 697px" /><figcaption>Half-God of Rainfall, New York Theatre Workshop Production (Photo: Joan Marcus)</figcaption></figure>
HALF-GOD OF RAINFALL
Written by Inua Ellams
Directed by Taibi Magar
American Repertory Theater
Through September 24
Based on a poetic work by Nigerian writer Inua Ellams, Half-God is Homeric, syncretistic, fantastical. Ellams describes it as “an epic revenge fantasy, a meditation on power and patriarchy, a Black feminist response to the #MeToo movement, Nigeria’s answer to Marvel’s Avengers, and a feature film waiting to happen. A friend described it as a love-letter to lone parenting—it explores the extensive lengths a mother goes to in order to protect her son from an abusive father.”
This poetic monomyth moves its hero Demi from a small village in Nigeria to the courts of basketball stardom in the Western world. With its phantasmal blend of Yoruba spirituality, Greek mythology and Western cultural iconography, the production feels dreamlike. This is an archaeological storyline that digs down into the source of the mythological.
But making poetry work as theatre is not without its difficulties, and Half-God suffers from some of those adaptation challenges. There are moments in this production that feel inert, falling short of the dramatic tension needed in a theatrical event (a level of tension that, interestingly, is not required in a film.) While the ensemble cast is full of expansive energy and passion, the narrative itself felt more earthbound than airborne.
Notwithstanding, the production is visually sumptuous. Kudos to the whole creative team: costume design by Linda Cho, lighting design by Stacy Derosier, sound design and music composition by Mikaal Sulaiman, projection design by Tal Yarden, and movement direction by Orlando Pabotoy.
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<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/AssassinsJPEG.jpg?fit=697%2C392&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17336" srcset="https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/AssassinsJPEG.jpg?w=2398&ssl=1 2398w, https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/AssassinsJPEG.jpg?resize=300%2C169&ssl=1 300w, https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/AssassinsJPEG.jpg?resize=1024%2C576&ssl=1 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/AssassinsJPEG.jpg?resize=768%2C432&ssl=1 768w, https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/AssassinsJPEG.jpg?resize=1536%2C863&ssl=1 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/AssassinsJPEG.jpg?resize=2048%2C1151&ssl=1 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/AssassinsJPEG.jpg?w=1394&ssl=1 1394w" sizes="(max-width: 697px) 100vw, 697px" /><figcaption>Assassins, Lyric Stage (Photo: Mark S. Howard)</figcaption></figure>
ASSASSINS
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by John Weidman
Directed by Courtney O’Connor
Through October 15
Assassins was first performed in 1990. But the play is unnervingly timeless. In fact it feels like it was written for this very moment in our history.
The premise of the play is a wild idea: Choose nine presidential assassins, some successful and some not, then bring their very specific grievances and issues into a play with music. (It may be a minor point to call this a “play with music.” But Assassins doesn’t feel like it should be categorized as a “musical.” The content is way too serious, and the music, though Sondheimly masterful, is ancillary to the storyline.) Throughout the play Director Courtney O’Connor chose to use no gun props—the human hand shaped like a pistol, with sound effects, is all that is needed—until the final scene. And then, each assassin now armed, the true terror of this story is delivered in an instant.
Hats off to this Lyric Stage production. Performed in an intimate space, the cast and the energy spill out into every corner of the house. High fives to the actors who give these legendary misfits their chance to speak:
John Wilkes Booth (Robert St. Laurence)
Samuel Byck (Phil Tayler)
Leon Czolgosz (Daniel Forest Sullivan)
Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (Lisa Kate Joyce)
Charles J. Guiteau (Christopher Chew)
John Hinkley (Jacob Thomas Less)
Sara Jane Moore (Shonna Cirone)
Lee Harvey Oswald (Dan Prior)
Guiseppe Zangara (Teddy Edgar)
In Deleuze’s nomenclature, Assassins is cartographic. The assassin storyline is perennial and ubiquitous, one that continues to morph and resurface. The inevitable tenacity of that very particular storyline is embodied by John Wilkes Booth as he whispers his advice into the ears of his many latter-day copycats.
In the words of director O’Connor, “Our relationship with violence and guns, what it means to be an American, and with our history are more fractured than ever…We as 2023 America must be willing to look critically at our past and explore how the actions of a few ‘different’ people screaming to be heard have reverberated, repeated, and harmed—and who might be screaming around us today.”
The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/09/19/more-than-just-out-or-in/">More Than Just Out or In</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com">Slow Muse - By Deborah Barlow</a>.
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">17332</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>Todd Hearon: A Salmon’s Journey</title>
<link>https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/08/26/todd-hearon-a-salmons-journey/</link>
<comments>https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/08/26/todd-hearon-a-salmons-journey/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[deborahbarlow]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sat, 26 Aug 2023 22:59:51 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Creativity]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.slowmuse.com/?p=17320</guid>
<description><![CDATA[There’s a story told by the poet Ruth Stone. While working in the fields in Virginia, she could feel and hear when a poem was traversing the landscape, coming right at her. It was like a “thunderous train of air,” shaking the earth under her feet. The only thing to do was “run like hell” […]
The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/08/26/todd-hearon-a-salmons-journey/">Todd Hearon: A Salmon’s Journey</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com">Slow Muse - By Deborah Barlow</a>.
]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
 
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/0031892905_10.jpg?fit=697%2C929&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17321" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/0031892905_10.jpg?w=900&ssl=1 900w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/0031892905_10.jpg?resize=225%2C300&ssl=1 225w, https://i0.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/0031892905_10.jpg?resize=768%2C1024&ssl=1 768w" sizes="(max-width: 697px) 100vw, 697px" /></figure>
There’s a story told by the poet Ruth Stone. While working in the fields in Virginia, she could feel and hear when a poem was traversing the landscape, coming right at her. It was like a “thunderous train of air,” shaking the earth under her feet. The only thing to do was “run like hell” to the house, grab pen and paper and try to capture it as it passes through. 
Sometimes she wouldn’t make it in time. And when that happened, the poem just kept barreling along, looking for another poet.
 Stone’s notion of creativity having its own intentionality isn’t a new idea. Even so, artists have approached that topic with caution. Ours is a linear culture that is heavily skewed to what can be measured and predicted. The claim that poems are cavorting across landscapes looking for takers doesn’t fit with that consensus reality.
Even so, artists are beginning to more openly discuss the uncanny nature of inspiration. That recent candidness has been encouraged by music “midwife” and impresario Rick Rubin with his new book, The Creative Act, one that stands straight up in advocating for the mystical nature to creativity. From Rubin’s point of view, “We are all translators for messages the universe is broadcasting. The best artists tend to be the ones with the most sensitive antennae to draw in the energy resonating at a particular moment.” So no, it is not just a Ruth Stone thing. While these insights from Stone and Rubin are uplifting, there is the verso to ebullient and flowing creativity to consider. Sometimes you offer an open hand with trust, and nothing shows up. Every artist knows the bleak back side of being stuck. A poem comes barreling through and you miss it. What do you then? What happens when everything seems to be falling flat? How do you get to what’s next? Writer’s block is a general term for being creatively stymied, but of course it affects every kind of artistic endeavor. The prodigious abundance of advice about how to avoid it speaks to its pervasiveness. Take a hike. Try out a different workspace. Turn off your phone. Alter your work hours. Rubin’s method is to say, “Let’s figure it out together. Tell me, what do you like? What do you feel? When was the last time you were really excited by it?” These recommendations can certainly be useful. My experience however is that each encounter with being stuck has its own particular texture and topology. What cracked the code last time may not work now. And there is another dimension to this dilemma to consider. Like our physical bodies, creativity changes as we age. What stymied me at 20 is very different from what snags me now. As Carl Jung noted, “We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning.” I started Slow Muse nearly 20 years ago as a place to write about the mysteries of creativity. The topic appears to be bottomless, and its dual nature—the rubberbanding between exquisite euphoria and parched frustration—can feel unnecessarily punishing. I’ve been an artist for 50 years, but the back and forth from one end of that spectrum to the other does not seem to be oscillating with any less amplitude. This summer brought some glimmerings to my studio, but those moments were interspersed with longer periods of signal free radio silence. While I may think I am ready to move on to my next destination, the itinerary has not yet arrived. Customer service? Hello? I have had time to consider how my thinking and feeling about this has become Procrustean, locked into an on/off, in/out, yes/no modality. Inspired/not inspired is a construct of my own making. Perhaps this moment in my life is an opportunity, in the Zen sense, to truly surrender and detach from these confining dialectics. Maybe I need a different and better way to think and feel about all of this. Those were some of the questions I was contemplating in early August when I drove to Portsmouth New Hampshire for an album release performance by Todd Hearon with a cavalcade of his music making friends. From the minute they began playing, I was swept into a sense of bliss. The music. The songwriting. The performance. It was wild, fresh and unencumbered. Here was an artist, deeply in his flow, who was making room for the rest of us to jump in and float along with him. I’ve known Todd for over 30 years. Prodigiously talented, he was a touring musician before he left Texas for Boston to become a poet, get a PhD in English/Editorial Studies, start a theater company in Boston’s South End and meet up and marry the remarkable Maggie Dietz. Now on the faculty at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, Todd continues to do what he does. As one reviewer recently wrote, “If Todd Hearon were not so humble, so kind-hearted and congenial, it would be easy to resent his endless talents.” This poet/musician/composer/songwriter/playwright/author/scholar/teacher/father/friend was also the lynchpin for bringing Clew into existence, a collaborative installation at the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy that brought together Jon Sakata, Jung Mi Lee, Lauren O’Neal, Todd and me. The whole adventure was an experience of unfettered joy, and it soldered us all into a circle of lifelong friendship. After putting music making behind his many other pursuits (like publishing several volumes of poetry,) Todd purchased a 1950 Gibson J-50 acoustic guitar in 2016 from a 90-year-old grandmother in South Carolina. From the minute he placed his hands on this guitar–now named Myrtle–the songs just began to flow. Now, five years and a “salmon’s journey” later, over 80 have been written. Like the earth’s magnetic field that directs the salmon’s return, this path feels indelible. “I co-write with Myrtle now and believe that she has the songs in her,” he said. “She has melodies, chord progressions and phrasing that I never would have thought of. She has songs she wants to express, and I’m just trying to keep up with wherever she’s going.” What has emerged is a stunning body of work. While it has deep roots in previous styles and musical predecessors, this music is elementally Hearonesque. It sits easily with the masterful Americana storytelling songwriting tradition of Townes Van Zandt, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Guy Clark, Steve Earle. “I want to write songs that sound as if they could have been written by anyone — and no one. Songs that have been around forever, that came from the hills and the dawn, That’s the highest bar I can think of, total anonymity, and I fail to reach it with most every song I write. But that’s my goal. To write a handful of songs of that transparent quality and caliber.” Ever the wordsmith, Todd used the phrase, “inimitable anonymity” to describe his musical aspirations. I asked him to elaborate on that idea which he did, memorably: “Usually, we associate the word inimitable with a quality of individual style, that may also be related to a powerful and immediately recognizable personality, the way Picasso or Muhammad Ali are inimitable. And so to combine it with anonymity appears a paradox. The art I most admire—and I’m speaking here primarily of songwriting, but it could certainly apply to other media as well—is art that renders its creator invisible, and could potentially have been composed at any time, by anyone. The catch is that not just ‘anyone’ could do it; that’s where the inimitability of the virtuoso comes into the picture. Listen to some of Gillian Welch’s early tunes—Orphan Girl, By the Mark, Caleb Meyer. ‘Personality’ is absent. The songs sound like they were written by the hills and hollows of Appalachia. That’s the virtuosity. She’s immersed herself so deeply in the tradition that it speaks through her. Her voice is its voice, and vice versa.” With his unfailing humility, he added that songwriting is “your signature in another person’s ink, and the ink is timeless, but you don’t know where that ink came from.” Todd’s lyrics access a range of voices, from the 17th century Quaker martyr Mary Dyer (a song that won first prize from American Songwriter magazine) to stragglers living at the margins of life. He can also tell a few of his own stories which he does beautifully in the ballad Chinatown, written for his partner Maggie. Introduction: This one goes out to the only little lady in my life really worth yodeling about, my “I do” partner in life, Maggie Dietz, with unending gratitude for her faith, support and understanding. And with the memory of strolling down among the ruins of a Chinese New Year early one Sunday morning in the city of Boston, as our new life together was first beginning to open. CHINATOWN The unlikely fire on the ledge and the room swam with candles The wine had gone straight to your head, you said I don’t understand you When you said that, did you mean to suggest I might like that, with your head on my breast? Squall at the window and the snow piling forty feet deep I can dig myself home on my own unless you’d care to sleep Together for the rest of the night Together for the rest of our lives Yodelady Little lady I do Yodelady Little lady I do The fireworks down in Chinatown Little busted lives across the ground You could light the night sky, you could howl down the moon You could blow it all just looking if you don’t have clue Little lady I do Yodelady Little lady I do The tea kettle screamed and the Joe Henry streamed from the kitchen “We swung like a gate and we locked and we knocked like an engine” Together for the rest of the night Together for the rest of our lives Together by the unlikely light Together like I told you that night Little lady I do Yodelady Little lady I do Since the concert I have been listening steadily to every Todd Hearon tune available* and eagerly awaiting his next performance at the Word Barn on November 10.** These songs are both timeless and engaging, like the artist who penned them. And for reasons I have yet to determine, that “inimitable anonymity” of this work feels like a soothing Balm of Gilead to me, something I have needed as I attend to my sub rosa imaginings yet to surface. What Todd is doing has kept me hopeful and receptive. Tom Nozkowski, a painter I admire deeply, spoke in a manner that resonates with Todd’s project: “I like painting best when it turns a little homely, turns away from the grandiose and opts for simple desire. To really want to possess something and to be willing to do anything to get it will take you pretty far.” A salmon’s journey. A final word, from Todd: “The young artist has so many tricks he wants to display, to differentiate himself from his peers, his elders and the tradition he may be working against. As one matures, there is the moving into the silence and stillness of the self. The stone. And into what one hopes might be the authentic and aboriginal voice, prior even to the predecessors. There’s not so much noise there. It’s cave paintings. Driplets of candlelight and murmur. Three chords and the truth. Maybe that’s what I was trying to get at.”
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/ToddNH.jpg?fit=697%2C425&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-17322" srcset="https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/ToddNH.jpg?w=1968&ssl=1 1968w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/ToddNH.jpg?resize=300%2C183&ssl=1 300w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/ToddNH.jpg?resize=1024%2C624&ssl=1 1024w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/ToddNH.jpg?resize=768%2C468&ssl=1 768w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/ToddNH.jpg?resize=1536%2C937&ssl=1 1536w, https://i2.wp.com/www.slowmuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/ToddNH.jpg?w=1394&ssl=1 1394w" sizes="(max-width: 697px) 100vw, 697px" /></figure>
Performing at Portsmouth’s The Music Hall Lounge, August 5, 2023
***
– To listen to the first two released albums from Todd’s projected three-volume “wandering stream” of song, Border Radio and Yodelady: <a href="https://toddhearon.bandcamp.com/album/yodelady">Bandcamp</a> <a href="https://open.spotify.com/artist/2p9dj2BNbeutfNSFlw6qs5">Spotify</a> <a href="https://soundcloud.com/toddhearon">Soundcloud</a> His lyrics can be found here: <a href="https://www.toddhearon.com/yodeladylyrics">Todd Hearon</a> – <a href="https://www.thewordbarn.com/">Word Barn</a> Exeter New Hampshire November 10, 8pm
 
The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com/2023/08/26/todd-hearon-a-salmons-journey/">Todd Hearon: A Salmon’s Journey</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.slowmuse.com">Slow Muse - By Deborah Barlow</a>.
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