Tag Archives: solo performance

telling stories

Slovenian graffiti of an elephant, a mouse, and cat's head growing on a stem(It’s 6am and I’ll have to get ready for work in a half hour. for what work? for the paid work. Writing has never been the paid work. it’s the love work. it’s the thing I clear out my calendar for, and then sweat over. it’s the passion, the heartbeat, what I betray with television and busy-ness and food. )

I want to figure out how it is that we tell our untellable stories, the stories we aren’t supposed to know the words for.

Last night I went to see Words First at CounterPulse in San Francisco, because my friend Dominika Bednarska was going to be performing excerpts from her longer solo performance My Body Love Story. As I sat in the audience just before the show began, I had that experience that often happens for me when I’m out at a Bay Area performance, that I’m in love with everyone in the room — I’m in love with the performers for their ferocity and bravery, for their audacity and artistry, for their belief in themselves and their own work, their understanding that what they are creating is something that others will want to see/hear/taste/smell/feel/experience. And I’m in love, too, with the audience, for their time and commitment, for their willingness to spend their money not on french fries and a coke, not on a movie, at least not this night — on this night, we’re in a quiet performance space in the middle of noisy way downtown San Francisco, and we are here to see new live solo work. I fall in love with the spaces, too, the performance spaces and bars, the coffee houses & restaurants that will host these gigs, that believe in live art, in art-in-community. I find myself profoundly grateful to be living where I do, and understanding, too, that all over the country, all over the world, folks are standing up and sharing art and creativity this way. It’s stunning to me, and glorious.

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