A Voice to Perform: One Opera / Two Plays
A Voice to Perform is:
HANNAH CUT IN: Assembled in tine-bound segments, each derived from the idea of interruption in the writings of Hannah Arendt, this play was created for a Poets Theater event at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, 2007.
MEMORY PLAY: A two-act, multifaceted conceptualization of memory-as-performance proffered by personified creature and instructions, a child, and a Miltonic Humiliator Toy.
GARDNER OF STARS, AN OPERA: A duo, a trio, a quarte, an ensemble, this work adapts Harryman’s experimental novel, Gardener of Stars “paradise and wastelands of utopian desire.”
“Harryman’s poets’ theater emphasizes embodied identities at the same time that it deconstructs them. These identities are not incidental, and they are not nonspecific; rather, they are fluid.” – Heidi Bean, Acts of Poetry
A Voice to Perform: Youtube Performances
“Carla Harryman bringing on what’s new, what’s relevant! Clarity of Complexity / Complexity of Clarity”—Rodrigo Toscano
A Voice to Perform by Carla Harryman is a response to the COVID-19 pandemic and an instigation of on-line performance experiments. The video channel celebrates the publication of A Voice to Perform: One Opera/Two Plays, presenting interpretations of Carla’s opera, Gardener of Stars, and her Poets Theater pieces, Memory Play and Hannah Cut In. Each performer selected a segment or several segments of one of the pieces in the book, interpreting these freely, in any way that pleased them and was possible within pandemic circumstances. “The transposition of the text to performance is an occasion for multi-perspectival interpretation rather than faithful expression. Yet, text and performance remain connected as mutual explorations of performance and language,” the author writes in her Notes.
Contributing artists are: Jon Raskin (Sacramento), Michelle Rollman (New Jersey), Billy Mark (Detroit), Rachel Levitsky (Brooklyn), Tania Chen (Brooklyn), and kathryn nowinski, david kuhnlein, and addy malinowski (Detroit).
A Voice to Perform: One Opera/Two Plays is:
Gardener of Stars, an Opera: an exploration of the paradise and wastelands of utopian desire; Memory Play: a multifaceted conceptualization of memory-as-performance; and Hannah Cut In: a piece for speaking voices and manual typewriters derived from the idea of interruption in Hannah Arendt; and text and performance Notes, “My thinking is influenced by structured improvisation in music…”. A Voice to Perform: One Opera/Two Plays is available for purchase here.
A Voice to Perform video channel will be updated with additional interpretations in September 2020. Production by Andrea Sisson. View all the projects here.