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My last post was about sitting on the edge of this huge Holocaust & Genocide Research Collection, having been commissioned to write a performance piece for an event on April 14, and that date getting nearer and nearer and not having any idea how to get in.
So, I got in, and the event is this week, on Thursday, and I hope you can come. Here are some thoughts I wanted to share with you:
As you know, my focus for many years – in my own work and in teaching — has been creating the bridge between personal story and artistic expression.
Last year, I was commissioned to create a performance piece based once again on personal story, but not my own. This performance piece was to be based on first-person testimony from the new Holocaust & Genocide Research Collection at the USC Library.
How do we shine light into inexplicable horror? How do we find something to say (story) in accounts of events in the face of which we can barely breathe?
That’s what we’re looking at this week at USC.
Thursday night is my performance, with a panel response and open inquiry into the interaction between artists and first-person testimony, specifically accounts of trauma or catastrophe.
Friday is a lunchtime forum for creative artists with fiction writer and Holocaust scholar Cliff Spargo (including lunch).
I am proud to be a part of next weeks’ events, an unveiling for the community ofl the Holocaust & Genocide Collection which — along with the Shoah Foundation, also housed at USC — is the foundation of what they call a research cluster in Resistance to Genocide, intended to draw scholars and students from around the world.
Genocide has been perpetrated, continues to be perpetrated.
Artists — writers, performers, visual artists, all of us — wield tools that allow us to give voice to the unspeakable. Here we meet and we ask, How we can mirror what no one wants to see, no one wants to know, in a way that opens eyes to the possibility of action?
If you’re in LA, please join us. If you’re far, far away, we’ll post video from both the Thursday performance/discussion and the Friday forum on the web. I’ll put the link on my home page.
And for more info, click here
