More on Cross/Walking

I'm still working on the best way to share video documentation of my recent performance, Cross/Walking.  But until then, here are a few stills from the recent production. I begin the performance with a brief introduction of themes about place and space and the practice of place-making while "rappelling" along the stage edge.  This piece is titled "Enter/Cross/Exit," and ends with me off stage and a vibrating rope stretched across the liminal space between audience and stage -- "a trace of a crossing from entrance to exit."

The logic of the show as titled suggested taking on Christian faith and what it might say about environmental advocacy.  I walk a fine line in honoring Christian faith without proselytizing.  My point is that the cross, as symbol, is something we all share -- believers and non-believers alike.  The idea of carrying it, literally or symbolically, as a pilgrimage of sorts resonates as a way of, well, "walking one's talk."  I use this particular meditation to explore ideas often expressed as "Creation Care," a deliberate attempt to challenge belief among some evangelicals that to be Christian is to be anti-environmentalist or that environmentalists are only pagan, nature-worshipers.  As I've posted elsewhere on this blog, my own faith skews more toward agnostic or interfaith than Christian (I was raised Unitarian).  So my goal in this section of the performance is to try to speak to Christians within a discourse they value about the lessons in their faith tradition to be good stewards of the earth.

That said, I am also aware that a lot of bad things have been done in Christ's name, and that the symbol of the cross has too often been used as a weapon more than a symbol of love.  I don't shy away from that fact in this monologue.  How could I?  But since the show is about process-oriented rather than object/product-oriented thnking, I am more interested in what people do with their faith and symbols.  This leads me to do some things with the symbol that create some, well, challenging images.  But lest we think this is only a provocative image, my partner informed me about a practice by a military contractor to inscribe the cross in gun sights, including codes referencing Biblical verses. 

Following this section of the performance, I transform the cross into an easel and do a section titled "Trip/Tychs."  There is an embedded pun on "trip" in this section as I travel between images, telling and sometimes improvising prose-poem stories that connect the images.  I also link to the idea of the triptych as an altar piece.  The power of three images together is their interrelationship.  So, I use the triptych to explore connection, as well as to interact with the audience. 

I follow this piece with a mock lecture by a character named Dr. Nathan Jogary.  He describes an expedition to an "impossible mountain," using and referencing slides that have nothing to do with what he is talking about.  Or, well, in a kind of chance aesthetic, the relationship between what he says and what he shows is abstract enough to allow audiences the productive, imaginative space to make their own connections.  The images in this faux-lecture are digital artworks I have made for abstract comics and asemic writing.

Finally, I end with a meditation with the audience about connection while passing out a rope that slithers through them, hand to hand, like a snake in the grass, like a winding path.  I use the same rope that I used in the opening monologue not only to neatly tie up the performance, but also to untie the performance and rupture the exit.  The last moment of the performance involves me exiting through the theatre entrance, dragging the rope with me, creating a kind of path to the outside world.  The last line (which trails away as I walk away): "It exits and becomes an entrance which becomes an exit which becomes an entrance which becomes an exit which becomes..."

[As I noted before, I designed this show to be portable.  If you are reading this and would like to bring this show or my earlier piece, "Trail Mix," to your community, contact me at jmgray32(at)gmail(dot)com.  I am deeply committed to using performance to spark dialogue about environmental issues.  I can couple this performance with a lecture or series of workshops on performance and environmental advocacy.]

Note: Special thanks to Christi Saindon for the photo-documentation of this performance.

"Cross/Walking" Opens Tonight

This image is the program cover for my newest solo performance, "Cross/Walking."  I'm sitting here waiting to go to the theatre to get warmed up and set up and ready to go.  I want to be in the right performance head-space, but I am also getting bored out of my mind waiting.  So.  Why not blog a little about it?

This show is a mash-up of interests particularly near and dear to me.  First, I am a scholar of communication with particular interests in rhetorical studies and performance studies.  For me, performance is both a mode of sharing and a mode of exploring.  So, a lot of my work actually involves creating public events where I (alone or with others) share performance work exploring a wide variety of topics.  But I also teach classes and run workshops where we use performance to explore phenomenon using a variety of protocols -- sometimes called "experiential learning" or "performative pedagogy."

I also have a strong interest in visual communication, with a particular interest in comics.  I think there is a natural connection between some of the ways performance works with images and words and the ways comics do.  I am also "drawn" (ha!) to the idea that comics are a particular kind of literature -- images in sequence bearing a closer relationship to literature than, say, film.  But as comics theorists (they exist!) note, there is something going on in that space between illustrated panels ("the gutter," so to speak).  A comics artist works creatively with that empty space so that the reader does interesting work in making the connection across panels.

Finally, I specialize in scholarship about environmental communication, including how we engage in public discourse about the ecological systems that support us.  In environmental communication, we note that how we talk about nature, ecosystems, etc. is just as important if not more so than what environmental science usually tells about the same.  I am drawn particularly to the role visual messages (from 19th Century landscape painting to pictures of the Earth from space, from films to activists' "image event" protests) play in shaping our understanding of environmental issues and motivating our action.

"Cross/Walking" deals with the intersection of all of these interests.  The central thesis of the show is that we, in the US particularly, tend to be object- or product-oriented.  We focus on things, objects, commodities, etc. I believe a positive shift in environmental awareness requires us to be more aware of processes and relationships.  Using that idea of the "gutter" in comic strips as a staged visual metaphor, I encourage the audience to do the work of making meaning between images.  In one piece in the show, this involves me telling stories between random illustrations of everyday objects, taking cues from the audience as to what images to use and how to combine them.  In another, I give a mock lecture about an exploration of an "impossible mountain" that includes slides -- that have nothing to do with what I am talking about (I use a lot of my abstract comics in this slide show).  At one point, I pass a rope out and through the audience so that we are literally connected by a material object.

Another theme of this performance is how difficult it is to talk about particular experiences (in nature, in performance, in our everyday lives) without relying on common and shared experiences.  But, I argue, this also robs the experience of its particularity.  So, recognizing that we transform spaces (pre-existing territories) into places (particular sites of personal meaning and experience) through our actions and communicative operations there, I encourage the audience to be less concerned about the difficulty of sharing particular connections to particular places than with the practice of place-making.

And if all that sounds too heady, then consider this: I rappel across the stage edge, I improvise narratives at the audience's direction, I carry a cross on a pilgrimage, I transform that cross into a gun, I amuse with puns and jokes, and I wrap it all up with images that echo and transform.  And all in a little under an hour.

Should be fun.  Let's see how the opening night audience likes it.

Checking in on Poemics

A Poemic in the style of Satu Kaikkonen

It's been a while since I've shared some of my poemic work on this blog.  When I am not doodling political cartoons and commentary over at Black Magpie Theory, I also noodle around with experimental comics forms, including poemics, abstract comics, and asemic writing.  "Poemics" is a term coined in 1991 by Alvaro de Sa, a Brazillian poet who considered poemics a "metalanguage of poetry."  While this origin locates poemics as an outgrowth of visual poetry ("vispos") and concrete poetry, contemporary poemic artists explore a variety of hybrid possibilities between poetry and comics.

When I stumbled across Piotr Szreniawski's poemicstrip blog a little over a year ago, I recognized a literary/art form I had already been exploring with a local arts collective, BAR Corporation, as we made conceptual art comics for the SIUC student newspaper.  Working with Piotr and other poemic artists, I've contributed work to collaborative artist book projects, an up-coming issue of Xerolage, a forthcoming essay on connections between experimental comics and performance art for the Polish comics journal, Zeszytow Komiksowych, and had a multi-page graphic poem accepted in the journal, Palooka.  And all that more or less just in the last year. Whew!

All of which is simply to say that poemics and experimental comics have been very good to me.  I encourage you to check out the work being done at some of the blogs in the list over there on the right, or to follow the hyperlinks in this post.  Copied below is some of the work I've been contributing to the poemicstrip blog.  Enjoy.

In response to a prompt about "visual technologies"

Working with asemic writing

In response to a prompt on "fashion"

An homage to the collaboration of e.e. cummings and Krazy Kat

A poemic haiku

A love poemic for Valentines Day