One Day Before the Performance

Another one of the photos on display at the National Hispanic Cultural Center.
This one was taken by Soledad Cordoba. It is one of several that still
 haunts me with its beauty and strangeness.

I keep thinking about the Women and Women performance at the National Hispanic Cultural Center. I suspect the audience will feel like they are sitting inside a stereo system, and the sounds will be soothing and difficult and, above all, thought-provoking.

Using primarily our voices - both words and sounds, Jamie Figueroa, Valerie Martinez, Shelle Sanchez and I intend to give the multiphonic experience of really looking at the photos, of deconstructing them into the main character, or the woman shooting the photo, or someone else observing. And then, we move away from that, and talk instead about us, and how each photo affects us.

We've rehearsed and rearranged our script several times now. Sometimes I recognize what I wrote; other times, I've taken ownership of someone else's words, the words I'll be saying. I know enough of the script to feel comfortable with it, not enough for it to be stale.

The flow is remarkable.

It's heady stuff - writing about women, with other women, until you don't know - exactly - which of the many voices are truly yours.


Five Poets Respond to "Women & Women," Photographs by Spanish Women
Saturday, March 19 , 2011
6:30 pm
Domenici Education Center
Free

Performance Poetry - Where it Starts

Ouka Leele, one of the photographers in a show called Women & Women 

In March, words will blow around me like a storm. 

Slowly, over the next weeks, I plan to tell you a bit about three performances I have scheduled – all are poetry-based, but each one unique.

One of the events is a collaborative word-response to an exhibit at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque. The exhibit showcases enormous photographs by five female artists. I am working with three women poets to create a group response. 

The first step was personal. A few weeks ago, I stood in front of each photograph and looked at it. I looked into the room of each photograph. When words came to me, I wrote them down. I wrote sloppy descriptions, and I wrote about how each photograph made me feel. I wrote words like “polywog clouds” because that’s what I saw.