Saturday, April 29, 2006
everything is a symptom
... or a side-effect, a by-product. This is the extension of an idea in the current show I've designed lights for and am running, a one-woman piece called "mercedes", by Marion deVries. It's a pretty funny piece, in a neo-hippy woman-power kind of way. I'm constantly finding new things in this show.
And I love the idea that everything -- every person, animal, or object, every social structure or religion or behaviour -- is a symptom rather than a discrete thing in itself. Something happened that, for whatever reasons, intentional or not, resulted in the stuff we have now. It makes me think back to connect with the stuff that resulted the symptom of flesh and memory that I call me. I am what went into making me. And so is religion, canned beans, Cubism, and Iraq. And fridge magnets.
Am I making sense?
Bea's back in a few days, which is very exciting. It has been almost 3 weeks without her, though we have spoken quite a bit. She's doing fairly well, considering what's going on: making arrangements for her mother, who's Alzheimer's is "progressing", and doing it in Colombia, where the buses occassionally have to pass rows of tanks where they travel through Guerilla held territory.
The above image is from "A Suicide-Site Guide to the City", which I worked on a year ago. It's been on my mind lately because Darren, the writer, just had a book launch for a volume called Social Acupuncture -- the book contains the text of "Suicide-Site", as well as a synopsis of his recent direction in theatre, and a kind of manifesto for how he sees theatre as a potentially useful tool for social change -- using it like an acupuncture needle, touching on one tiny point on the social body to effect subtle change in the whole. a worthwhile read.
Wonder what our present version of art is a symptom of. A reaction against commodification? Or a capitulation to its forms? I'm tired and think I'll stop before this blog becomes a distorted side effect of my fatigue.
