Kickstarter

We started with 20 minutes of awesomeness last January in New York. At least that's what Ryan called it, and he was pretty dead-on. The Arts Presenters conference was happening, we were showcasing at the Warwick hotel, and I had pneumonia, but we had a 20 minute slot to perform a piece of this show for the very first time.

For that 20 minutes we started with an instrumental overture, went into this amazing poem by Jim Harrison to the music of "What Wondrous Love is This?." Then Neal Conan read from Dexter Filkins' "The Forever War" with Jackie starting "Old Cluck Hen" on the banjo and Hanneke joining in on fiddle. From there we played this incredibly beautiful 18th century Scottish tune called "Hector the Hero" which led into Lily reading from James Agee, and then she read Lucille Clifton's poem about visiting a slave graveyard at a southern plantation which made me cry, and the pictures that our director, James Hanrahan, picked to be projected while all of this was going on, were perfect. It was awesome. Truly. Time stood still.

Then we worked on it more in LA and got to 28 minutes done, then a few weeks ago we put together the rest of the show and did a private preview here in Annapolis. We did the first half of the first half, and the second half of the second half. 50 minutes all told.

Sometimes you don't know if the work will stand up to critical scrutiny. You don't even know if the hair standing up on the back of your neck because it feels so right, so consonant, you don't even know if that will translate at all to an audience. So you jump.

And we jumped off the cliff, performing parts of the show that were five months old, and parts of the show that were two days old - and it worked.

Six musicians, Neal Conan from NPR, actress Lily Knight (she's been in EVERYTHING, go ahead and look up her IMDB page, her work is prodigious.) and these intense and true photographs from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Putting it together has been long, labor intensive, brilliant, frustrating, complex, and more about the process later. Gotta run.
carolyn