“Carla Harryman bringing on what’s new, what’s relevant! Clarity of Complexity / Complexity of Clarity”
—Rodrigo Toscano

A Voice to Perform is a response to the COVID-19 pandemic and an instigation of on-line performance experiments. The videos below celebrate 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 is:

HANNAH CUT IN: Assembled in time-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, 2017.

MEMORY PLAY: A two-act, multifaceted conceptualization of memory-as-performance proffered by personified creatures and instructions, a child, and a Miltonic Humiliator toy.

GARDENER OF STARS, AN OPERA: A duo, a trio, a quartet, an ensemble, this work adapts Harryman's experimental novel, GARDENER OF STARS "paradise and wastelands of utopian desire.