ritual theatre: PROVENANCE

art as ritual as communal healing as processing as Necessity

i want to share with you one of the most important things i have ever made.

the inklings of it, from earlier in the year, began to crystallize in july 2018 while i was at the brooklyn museum, shortly after or during reading the words on the wall in cecilia vicuña’s ‘disappeared quipu’ exhibition. i wished honestly at times that it would just go away. because i didn’t know how to do it. it was Further than i had been, at the time. something of the Visceral. something of the Dangerous and the Just-Past. i was still somewhat terrified of ‘forgetting my lines’ even though i had always been a theatrical person and had been in many plays and instances of performance/recitation .. but this was something else. how to string together something so entirely unwieldy.

i still remember being in my first studio apartment, sitting on the floor, and writing out the ideas and images and memories and quotes on tons of index cards in the christmas lights, firelights. i still remember ‘hunkering down’ and writing it in a word document in my then-office, one night, afterhours. i still remember how the first time myself and my fellow ‘performers’ ran fully through the piece was during the first and only time we performed it. i remember someone asking me some time afterwards to bring ‘PROVENANCE’ into a festival and i said, i will never perform ‘PROVENANCE’ ever again. it was ritual, it was something that required witnesses, but also that i would’ve done if it was just myself and my ‘castmates’— who were two old friends and fellow performers game for the unexpected, the little girl i babysat who was i think 7 years old then, and my boyfriend at the time— with my brother doing tech and my sister helping with props and ephemera. the LIC gallery run by my friends that felt betrayed by my single-mindedness because i refused at all costs, including never ‘performing’ there again, not to use real fire.

i bring it in here because that was december 2018, and there has been A Stirring in me this year and These Days like the ‘next’ ‘PROVENANCE’ is nearing me. not because ‘i want to do theatre’ but because something in my body and soul understands that theatre was originally ritual and healing is communal and there are processes that can only happen with the body’s externalization and participation.

i hurt myself during the course of ‘PROVENANCE’— dousing myself with water, slamming myself into a wall, not being able to speak at all right before we started because i was literally so terrified of what we/i were trying to do, and (obviously unintentionally) fracturing the top part of my thumb and causing an injury that bled from that night into the next day— after i accidentally slammed the hilt of my sword down on my hand about 10-15 minutes into the show. the next day i took off work and got x-rays. the day after i came in and my boss slid the paper across the table that told me my job was in jeopardy and this wasn’t a probationary period or a warning. it was the year i went to the desert via greyhound bus, published my third book, hit my bottom of tumult and suicidality (though there would be more), received my (first, lol) diagnosis, chose not to take the pills; Embarked …

i have realized over the past few days that i have processed and not processed, in and of myself, For myself, what has happened since the fall. three friends’ deaths and nearly a fourth, one by suicide and the ‘nearly’ an attempt. all untimely, all sudden. tragic. not old age— lives fully lived— two with the weight of wrenching-out-from-under Tremendous Weight, Tremendous Pain.

i received a key today i can’t even write about yet, about why the spectre of death has been following me in these days leading up to my next birthday, why the terror of entrapment, stuckness— even in spaces like one-room public bathrooms in parks or restaurants, locks getting stuck, actively and full-on avoiding elevators and enclosed spaces— has been heightened. the story of skeleton woman has returned to me— her tangled up in my fishing line, trailing me as closely, bumping along so horribly, no matter how fast i try to evade. that resonating, burning image— me in the dark in the hut and Her There, as i discover, wound-up pile of bones, all disordered and strung in the fishing-line; i can see in the whale oil lamp-light.

there is anger in me, so much tiredness, pain and discomfort— again, and Again, about the changing of my life— today, once more, having to last-minute cancel something i initiated/pursued, that i thought would be Beautiful!, that would allow me to be of service— again, and Again, trying to frustratingly make sense out of something that makes no sense, exhaustingly parse through what is presenting itself and moving through me— what is premonition, what is fear, what is intervening forces, what is my body, my nervous system, my how the fuck do i express why i can’t do this ..

thank god; when i talk to those closest to me, even if they are across oceans, across the world— i realize, also, again, and Again, i am not alone in this. there are those of us navigating these landscapes every single day. the kind of normalcy that does not exist anymore, the kind of masking difference that isn’t fucking possible anymore, the tremulous edge of how the fuck will i survive like this in the overculture, the questions Again, the words— poverty, insecurity, benefits programs, resources, new systems, Emergence, The Unfamiliar, fear, distrust, the spectres, the spectres, swirling— but if i can find The Root. the world that is yet to come and Already Here.

the breaking edge, the breaking edge. […]

i don’t really have more to say; it will feel continuingly rambling and strange; but i Want ‘PROVENANCE’ here, i want this living artifact to be More Visible, not lost in my website or on youtube; this personage i was at 32 years old, my hair long, the time before i ‘formally’ was a storyteller— my Violence and my Beauty. so Valiant, so Broken, so brave and Shining and shattering.

may i be brave and soft, not ‘enough,’ but As I Am, to make something like this again.

may it begin Here.

more context on ‘PROVENANCE’ and its meaning and origins— which honestly still continue revealing themselves to me— is on my website here.

reflections from before the show:

“the ancient egyptians recognized that when the soul first awoke in the afterlife it would be disoriented and might not remember its life on earth, its death, or what it was to do next” … for these past years i have been on a journey of opposites. complete with a bipolar 2 diagnosis to reveal the pull between the old legend and the new— the girl i was, and the girl i knew i could be. locked in this narrative of becoming— never able to fully release into rebirth, and never fully able to let the old self die.
i realized today that PROVENANCE itself is the elongation of a moment i explore in the text— the moment between death and resurrection. it is, in effect— an orchestration of my own funeral. my own death and rebirth. i have been so close to death and darkness these years— at once running from it and settling in beside it so close it could feel my soul tremble. this is the Act of walking through it. ascribing meaning to it. //
i saw that other part of myself today, in my mind’s eye, appearing as a beautiful wounded deer. my first instinct was to heal it back to health. but as i sat with her i realized— she needs to be led through her own death. i need to be led through my own death. to not have to prove to myself, instead to finally know— i am certain of the Way. i am at once dying deer and death doula. i am at once soul in traversal and osiris standing at the gates. //
it is no coincidence that PROVENANCE begins with my death. because only in embodying and embracing it, are you able to travel with yourself to what is BEYOND it. a funerary rite of my own craft, and in so embracing— creation of an afterlife that is in actuality truest Life in itself. i create, as the ancestors of my spirit did. “these works served the same purpose: to remind the soul of its life on earth, comfort its distress and disorientation, and direct it on how to proceed through the afterlife” …

**

as i read this i wonder, if this Other Thing, this Next Thing— is about orchestrating not the death, but the Birth—?

[…]