performance

TrailOff stories coming this September!

Hey all!

Adrienne here with an update on TrailOff. Like many, our plans for this spring and summer have changed a bit.

Thankfully, despite the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, TrailOff is still very much in the works and will now launch this fall on September 10th! We’re SO excited to bring you ten amazing stories by authors throughout the Philly region. These amazing audio experiences speak so much to the moment we’re in: a connection with natural spaces and an expansion of whose voices we hear in them. These are explorations that are by turns delightful and difficult. We’re putting the finishing touches on the app and can’t wait to share these immersing narratives with you (in a socially distance-friendly format!) very soon.

In the meantime, here’s a little peak of the ten pieces that are headed your way:

The Way Sand Wants for Water by afaq

In a country built on dams holding back what we cannot bear, how do we begin to pull out the stones and let the water run through? The Way Sand Wants for Water is an ode to healing, a guided history of the land that reveals itself in poetry. Notice, breathe, and wander through a journey as fluid as the river that runs alongside it in this lesson on loss and what’s truly in the water.

Story tags: water, colonization, violence, healing, home, scars, Sudan, poetry, trees

Where the Light Won’t Go by ari

Emotionally-driven poetry meets queer Latinix experience in this Neil Gaiman-esque drama when Luz, a trans teen just killed in a car crash, meets Dog – the god of Death tasked to bring her to the underworld. In Where the Light Won’t Go a simple walk leads to discovering a set of deities sitting just behind the surface of human existence and perhaps even restarting the wheel of existence for the living world.

Story tags: Latin, singing gods, trans, violence, afterworld, fairy tale, adventure, swearing

River Devil II: The Return by Carmen Maria Machado

All Mercedes wants is to do her job: capturing behind-the-scenes shots for a cheesy horror movie sequel shot in Manayunk with her conspiracy-theorist camerawoman, Bernice. But travelers beware; the deceptively beautiful Manayunk Canal may have other ideas… Nature fights back in this cryptozoology-meets-The-Blair-Witch-Project horror story — River Devil II: The Return.

Story tags: monsters, murder, horror, The Jersey Devil, violence, Manayunk, humor, evil chanting

Deeply Routed by Denise Valentine

The flow of human history, like the water rushing to the sea, cannot be easily contained. Like truth, it defies our efforts to bury, divert, or ignore it. It overflows its banks, sometimes leaking in tiny trickles; sometimes erupting violently to the surface. Deeply Routed travels to places near and far, connected by these waterways, branching off like so many tributaries that flow to the Delaware River.

Story tags: history, searching, slavery, unexpected connections, journey, intuition, unforgetting

A Sycamore’s Psalm by donia salem harhoor

Told through the voice of a young poet collecting memories and reflections in a notebook, A Sycamore’s Psalm explores care-giving, family dynamics, loss, and roots of every kind. Travel with young Nehet – named after a tree – as she journeys through a diasporic legacy of Egypt, both ancient and contemporary, while encountering the history of the Perkiomen Creek and Trail in this gathering of lyric verse honoring loved ones present and past.

Story tags: Egypt, care-giving, dementia, Montgomery County, family, natural history, diaspora, Arabic, trees, creek, poetry

Appear to Me by Eppchez !

Appear to Me (aka A Pier to Me) mashes together the past and present itinerant denizens of the Delaware River’s piers. Filled with a dreamy troubadour spirit, rough songs and honest conversation swirl through these untold tales of the waterfront, narrated by feral cats channeling the hobo poet W. H. Davies, radical dock workers, Lenape boaters, cruisers, fishing teens, even talking litter, each simply seeking a moment of respite.

Story tags: queer history, feral cats, cruising, swearing, Wobblies, longshoreman, Yemayá, Lenni-Lenape

The Inside Outside by Erin McMillon

Confronted with ancestral ghosts and demons of her own making, poor Trenton is having a very, very bad day. Avoid that bubbling water and find some damn shoes alongside a sarcastic heroine who overcomes monsters of land, water and maybe even her own self-doubt in the comically inspired The Inside Outside.

Story tags: epic battles, humor, monsters, anxiety dreams, violence, flashbacks, ancestors, swearing

Conversations by Jacob Camacho

Diving into themes of ancestry, colonialism and race, Conversations imagines discussions that arise with the indigenous Nanticoke’ Lenni-Lenape people of past, present and future. The water of the Delaware River brings age-old questions to the surface: beckoning listeners to question, be aware of, and learn about the land they move through.

Story tags: Lenni Lenape, colonialism, Nihëlatàmweokàn, ancestral rage, time travel, water, We Are Still Here

The Land Remembers by Jacob Winterstein

In the late 1950’s as part of Urban Renewal, Philadelphia displaced over 8,000 residents from Eastwick aka The Meadows. The area was one of Philly’s only harmoniously integrated neighborhoods at a time when many racist housing policies were legal. In The Land Remembers, Nick (aka Nickel, aka Abe aka Abraham) reminisces about his last days living there.

Story tags: race, childhood, history, friendship, nostalgia, pastrami sandwiches, Urban Renewal

Chronicles Of Asylum by Li Sumpter

Set in future Philadelphia circa 2045 on the eve of a major cosmic event, Chronicles of Asylum follows savvy young journalist Liliquoi Brown as she investigates an otherworldly urban myth in hopes of finding two missing visitors to a refugee camp on the Schuylkill River. Exploring survival and sacrifice, home and exile, humanity’s fate and hope for the future, Chronicles follows the path of this unexpected trailblazer.

Story tags: Afrofuturism, quest, survival, mystery, epic, modern myth, climate change, apocalypse

A Million Female Gandalfs

Today I had my final class of the semester at one of the schools I teach at. For the final of Voice for the Stage, I ask my students to perform a monologue they’ve worked on for several weeks in the large mainstage theater in front of each other. They pick their monologues themselves; I allow them to be from movies or television, from a favorite play, anything that they are genuinely interested in. I do this because it’s a chance for these learners to test their abilities, honed over the last 14 weeks, to offer up the stories they’ve chosen to tell via their bodies. I want, and encourage them, to choose words they feel will be thrilling for them to inhabit. It’s a chance to see if the class has helped them in transmitting those narratives’ feelings and emotions out of their imaginations, through their voices and out into an audience.

Today a girl stepped onto the stage and performed a monologue from Lord of the Rings, playing the wizard Gandalf. I think about the fact that a year ago I was watching another girl performing another Gandalf monologue during this same culminating performance day and that earlier this semester I also saw another female Gandalf at a different school.

I think about how every single year there is a female Gandalf.

Last week, I sat in my living room and heard six fast and sharp pops from somewhere to the south and west of my window.

Oh no, I thought. I know what this sound is. I hope it’s something other than what I think it is, but if I’m honest I know exactly what this sound is, and still I keep working, hoping somehow that I’m mistaken until minutes later I hear the parade of several sirens in the distance and I can’t pretend any longer that what I already knew I knew wasn’t true.

In the moment I’m afraid, I’m scared, and I’m sad.

I think, I should call Brad and make sure he’s ok. Even though I know he’s at the theater, having left nearly 40 minutes ago, I should still just check and make sure.

I walk to the window and I see two police cars parked on the corner and several police walk into a mini market. Moments later I see several people, males of varying ages from teenager to thirty something adult, all walk quickly out of the store. They’re all African-American. They’re looking at their phones. A microsecond-long thought passes through my head, “What are the police doing? Why aren’t they stopping these men? What if they need to question them? What if they’re involved?”

This is the first thought that instinctually comes into my head. That they are guilty. It isn’t one of reasoned or rational thought. It’s gut reaction. It’s fear. It’s instinct. It’s the first story that comes to my mind.

A moment later I’m examining that thought, the first that flashed in my mind and I feel disgusted with myself.

In that moment I say, literally, as in actually I saw to myself out loud to the room, “What is wrong with you Adrienne? Why would you think that?”

I think, Why is the first narrative you’ve built around these humans who are leaving a store and looking at their phones one that assumes their guilt? What is it about them that makes you think this way before you even have had a moment to think? Why is the story you instinctually tell one of guilt and violence and implication? Why is the story you tell not one of a person scared and wondering if the people they know are alright? Why is their act of looking at of phones something that nonsensically becomes something nefarious instead of appearing innocent because it’s the EXACT SAME INSTINCT you yourself had?

And of course it’s because they are Black.

And in this moment, it’s painful to realize this.

And in this moment, it’s painful to realize that I do not want that impulse inside me.

And in this moment, it’s painful to realize that even though I do not consciously believe it, something about the world I live in has made this my gut instinct.

And in this moment I hate the world and I hate the gut instinct and I hate myself and I feel privileged and stupid and small.

I think, Why on instinct don’t you assume that these fellow humans are going to their own friends and families and making sure they are ok, that they hurry from this place because they too are scared and worried and want to feel comfort in a moment of stress and tension and possible tragedy?

I think, Why, why, why on earth is that not the story you instinctively picture?

I think about how quickly that terrible default story appeared in my mind. I think about the fact that I’m a storyteller by trade. I wonder about whether I’m telling stories that make it easier or harder for this kind of terrible default story to emerge.

I think about all this and I’m ashamed.

There is a darkness in you, I think. There’s something dark and sticky and terrible and it’s not something you put there on purpose but it is part of a much bigger problem that’s so so so terribly hard and sad and needs to be changed. I think about the color connotations of the words that my brain has just used to think about the problem, again the ones that simply came to mind. I think about how these too are problematic tropes that assume fault based on color and that they too infect the stories we tell.

This is not darkness, I think. You cannot think of the terrible thing that feeds the bad kind of stories as darkness. You are not allowed to equate darkness with that kind of evil and hatred.

I’m ashamed in that moment of the story that emerges from my brain without my asking it to appear. I hate it and I stand at my window and I look at the people walking by and I do my best to imagine a new story. In my new story I finally see the lines of worry in their faces. I think, You need to step back and work harder to see the world better. You need to work harder to get those other instinctual stories out of yourself, to find their roots and pull and pull and pull. You need to keep working on new stories that are better, you need something else to plant in their place.

Today between the myriad of moments in which I smile and clap and laugh with the group there’s a different kind of moment, one in which I pause and purse my lips for a moment and feel very very sad.

I’ve seen female Gandalfs and female Jack Nicholsons from A Few Good Men. I’ve seen Black students play Abraham Lincoln and Tom Cruise and Liam Neeson (saving his daughter from kidnappers) and Liam Neeson (fighting wolves in the woods). Today I see two girls with long black hair, girls who are Mexican, playing Carrie Bradshaw and Gretchen Weiner from Mean Girls. I’m sad that between the very occasional For Colored Girls… monologues there’s so much Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap and Macaulay Culkin from Home Alone.

I’m sad because every year I see a female Gandalf.

I’m sad because there are a million female Gandalfs, it seems. I’m sad because I’ve seen students choose to play sponges and mutants and demons and even a human embodiment of a font, and though every year I see SO many of my female students find power and depth in speaking like Ian McKellen pretending to be a bearded wizard I have never, not once, not even one single time in seven years of teaching, seen a male student decide that they’d find something exciting and inspiring about speaking words originally intended for a woman.

I’m sad because this must mean we are not doing well enough in the stories we have for my female students.

I’m sad because the first story that comes to my mind when I see a group of Black men reacting to a gunshot is the worst kind of story. I’m sad because this isn’t the story that should be brought to my mind. And because it is, we’re clearly not doing well enough in the stories we have for them either.

I’m sad because I know that I get so tired hearing stories about women that conform to all the stupid and terrible gender norms. I’m sad because I get so tired of having to hear these same stupid stories that are such a tiny part of the larger whole of what being feminine can mean. It hurts me that there aren’t a larger number of better stories for the women who stand on that stage.

I think about the times someone has created a story for me that I do not want to be a part of, of the effort it takes to remove this story from myself. I think about the way that I am doing the same to others without even realizing it, without wanting to, and that I need to keep striving to find a way to stop.

I think about the stories we as a culture force on people without their consent. I think about how we also allow those stories to be attached onto people, to dictate how their lives are told, while apathetically doing nothing. It makes me think about the way that stories about thugs and gangs and riots are used to distract us from the larger more terrible and oppressive stories about the world. It makes me think about the way that we shove these stories into the brains of children who don’t have the ability to judge these stories for the garbage they are. I think about all the work we are now responsible to do as adults in order to pull those stories out of ourselves.

I think about how we are literally wasting people’s lives by casting them in these shitty stories, how even a million female Gandalfs can’t create enough force to invert the imbalance.

And I think that this rooting, this active undoing and this need for rewriting for the better must be the job of our lives as artists. If we aren’t doing this, what good are any of the stories we go on to create? At this moment, as storytellers, we must take responsibility for the telling. For what other kind of magic can we possibly be here on earth to do?

– A

Labeling

hello.label

My niece Alice loves using her grandmother’s label machine.

She likes to spell out words she knows and affix them to the things around her. “Bunny” is somehow made more concrete and real once it has an official status indicator and “Baa baa” is better for having been appropriately categorized.

This is a natural trait, this need to put things in a box, to classify them to help us sort out where they go.

But labels having been causing me agita lately.

Back in the early aughts, when I had just finished my first year of college, my Dad picked me up with the clear the purpose to foster a father daughter bonding session on the long drive from Swarthmore back to Chicago. My father excitedly told me that he had borrowed a whole stack of CDs, all musicals, from the library. It would be a chance to bond over theater, my extracurricular interest that had expanded into actual curriculum in recent months.

It was sweet, immensely so. And yet, even at the tender age of 19, I felt a little weird about the gesture. It was because even by the end of freshman year I sensed that “Theater,” at least the thing I meant when I talked about it, was not the same kind contained in the CD’s he now so excitedly proffered.

And indeed Adrienne Mackey’s brand of “Theater” would turn out to be something else entirely.

When I tell the vast majority of people what I do I usually get responses that either include reference to Shakespeare or Broadway. Once in a great while, I get someone who went to the theater often who’d mention some great American play like Streetcar or Death of a Salesman. When I try to explain what I do, I usually feel weird. I have such a hard time articulating it. I have often found myself talking about what I am not doing – “I don’t work in traditional spaces” or “I trying drop conventions of linear narrative” or “I like to use the voice in non-traditional ways” – rather than what I am. And that always feels weird to me, because I never think about my work that way when I am making it. I never think of it as a reaction against anything. I just think of it as the way that I make stuff.

Over time, it started to depress me to talk about so and so’s cousin who played Mrs. Potts in the Beauty and the Beast musical or the latest production of Hamlet that stars some famous guy. In my twenties I would get mad about this, frustrated at this “muggle” response. But after too many instances of even the most patient parental types glazing over or looking confused about how to take the thing I was talking about and reconcile it under the label “Theater,” I think I’ve realized that it’s a little unfair to ask someone not to call up any of the most obvious reference points for the word.

A lot of the time when I talk about my work now I find myself saying something like, “It’s theater, well… sort of. It’s kind of like theater. But not like you think.”

Which makes me wonder: Am I doing “Theater”?

Some days I just don’t know.

I know that I was trained in theater. I know I’ve read a lot of plays. I know a lot about the history of the art form and have lots of opinions on its contemporary practitioners. I know that I see a lot of it. I know I talk to people about it a lot.

But I really wonder if I’m actually interested in doing it as almost everyone in the world defines it. When I don’t like being in a theater building, when I’m constantly trying to get off “stages,” when I rarely want to work on plays as most people define them, when I want to shake up the audience actor relationship, when I increasingly expect people not to sit and watch but participate, when my work starts looking more like a concert or a game or a tour… is it still theater?

When I was in residence at Drexel this past winter and created a traveling performance piece with the students I had the luxury of following behind the audience and hearing them talk in live time about the show.

One kid whispered, “What’s happening? I thought this was a play but the actors are everywhere and we’re outside. What is going on?!”

Another said to a friend, “You know the first time you watch cartoon network and you don’t understand what you’re seeing and it’s really weird but you think that you like it? That’s happening now.”

This tickles me, surprising these kids with an experience they didn’t expect. Some part of me was really proud to say, “Hey! I reclaim this crazy theater word and make you rethink what it is. And because you saw this and liked it you will now include this in your definition of what a play can be!”

But another part of me feels like maybe I’m doing a disservice. If that cartoon network quote kid really likes the thing he just saw, I don’t know that he’ll necessarily like “theater” as a whole. I heard a lot of these student audience members say they don’t like theater but they did like our play. I actually hear that fairly regularly. And when I describe my work I often say that I want to make theater for people that don’t think of themselves as a traditional theater audience.

And so I’m often loathe to use the word because the people I want tend not to be “theater people” and the audiences that tend to have a tradition of going to the theater aren’t often interested in the kinds of experiences I want to offer.

Some days trying to court “theater” audiences feels like advertising a folk performance at a heavy metal concert. Both audiences technically want to hear “music” but really there’s a point of diminishing returns in trying to treat the viewers as one in the same.

And, look, I know there are some labels for the different kinds of theater out there, but they are far fewer and far far less codified. Do the words usually attached to my kind of work – fringe, experimental, devised – actually say anything of substance? I don’t think so. Certainly not if you don’t know what that kind of work already looks like.

So I’m contemplating whether or not I’m going to call what I do “theater” at all. I’m contemplating how I can be proactive in labeling better. Because I think if I want a word for what I do that isn’t 90% not a good example, I’m going to have to find one for myself.

– A