Looking for Anne (Carson)

We have a couple of alerts for this weekend:

In Berlin, Germany:

Looking for Anne
Audio/Video Installation for three audience members
After the poem The Glass Essay by Anne Carson

Concept | Direction | Stage
Nicola Dahlinger
Video
Joanna Kane
Video cut
Marie Chartron
Sound
Sophie Watzlawick
Project coordination & Production
Catherine Launay

Produced by emerging properties - poetry . performance with with generous support from kunst:raum sylt quelle, Sylt and The English Theatre, Berlin.
As a Greek philologist Anne Carson is a mediator between the world of thought and the use of language of the antiquity and the modern age. In many of her poems she contemplates the nature of the Greek God Eros. The word “Eros” designates “lack” as well as “want”. The dynamic between these two states is central to The Glass Essay . It shows itself in the memories of the love relation-ship, in the triangle of the three protagonists and at the borders/connection points between different inner and outer times and spaces.
Whichever way you look at it, Eros takes up space and at the same time embodies a void: within us, between us and around us. LOOKING FOR ANNE is an attempt at such an experience of space within the frame of The Glass Essay.

The Glass Essay

In The Glass Essay Anne Carson juxtaposes three female protagonists with three timelines. The narrator, Anne Carson's lyrical self, visits her mother after a failed relation-ship in the high North of Canada. She has taken with her The Collected Work of Emily Brontë, who is her favourite author.
In the talks between mother and daughter in the kitchen and the solitary walks of the narrator in the moor landscape, Emily Brontë keeps appearing: details of her life, communicated through her sister Charlotte, voices of critics of Emily Brontë 's novel Wuthering Heights, quotes from the novel's characters, poems and her diary. All in all, Anne Carson links in her epic poem 23 characters.
The narrator struggles in The Glass Essay with her mother, her Alzheimer stricken father, with Emily Bronte, and with her former lover Law. Piece by piece she gathers together the memories of the relationship, the moment of breaking-up, and visions she had during meditation in the months that followed, like shards.

Performance

The performance explores the juxtapositions of the poem, and the inherent relation-ships within them, spacially. The scene is set in the narrator's mother's house (kitchen) and the surrounding moor. The kitchen is suggested by a table, chair, a kitchen lamp and a window on the rectangular stage space. The actress Leslie Malton plays the narrator/daughter and reads/recites the original text, Inge Sievers plays the role of the mother. While the daughter in her narration, struts across the moor, projected as a wall-sized video of a real moor landscape behind her and in the window, her mother sits at the kitchen table, unmoved. Emily Brontë takes up her own fixed place in the form of her collected works.
The narrator's visions are projected as fleeting image fragments, “glimpses of the soul”- in black and white on the moor landscape in the window, while the words describing the visions remain unspoken. A continual wind sound symbolises the connection between inner and outer.

Extract

“It's stunning, it is a moment like no other,
when one's lover comes in and says I do not love you anymore.
I switch off the lamp and lie on my back,

thinking about Emily's cold young soul.
Where does unbelief begin?
When I was young

there were degrees of certainty.
I could say, Yes I know that I have two hands.
Then one day I awakened on a planet of people whose hands
occasionally disappear—

From the next room I hear my mother shift and sigh and settle
back down under the doorsill of sleep.
Out the window the moon is just a cold bit of silver gristle low on
fading banks of sky.

Our guests are darkly lodged, I whispered, gazing through
The vault…”

(from The Glass Essay. Glass, Irony, and God, New Directions, 1995)

Dates

LOOKING FOR ANNE
Friday 08. June to Sunday 10. June 2007
Entry from 2pm, every 75 minutes:
2pm, 3.15pm, 4.30pm, 5.45pm, 7pm, 8.15pm, 9.30pm (last entry)

The English Theatre im F40, Studio, Berlin
Fidicinstraße 40, 10965 Berlin

Leslie Malton reads The Glass Essay by Anne Carson on Sunday 10. June, 8.00pm in The English Theatre. With reservation only: 030 - 48 49 47 04

The other alert comes from the Peak District:

Ranger led walks and events
We have walks and events suitable for everyone and many are accessible by public transport.
9 June 2007
North Lees: Fact, Fiction and Flora
A walk around North Lees Hall exploring the history, Bronte connection and wildflowers.
Public transport: Bus, Train
Suitable for: Pushchairs, Family
Start time: 11:30
End time: 15:00
Walk length: Between 5 and 10 miles

Categories: Alert, Art-Exhibitions, Emily Brontë, Poetry