That City : Rehearsal Feed

BackStories - When, or is it Where, or is it What?

by Mary Ann Hushlak Backstory – where to begin? Behind us, most certainly. Yet in terms of when, when to start from? Yesterday, last week, a month ago, a year ago, several years ago, most of a life? Or from a particular event? A particular something? Or a very specific place? Even as we say the word, our heads raise and tilt ever so slightly backwards. In fiction, backstory is about how a character gets to be like that, or does that, whatever the that of the story is. In real life, it’s more how each of us can be fathomed, can be understood, can be contextualized, can be tracked, how our bodily reactions and inner thoughts penetrate our actions, our gestures, our tone - right now, in this moment. Backstory is of course about time, time past, what is behind us and what we carry with us. Remnants, vestiges of habits, rituals, mementos as much as memories, crucial moments, scars, wounds, phobias and history. All of the remnants, through time and, also, through space. Like a

notes to self: a glossary for what i do

So it's a season of - among other things - digging through piles of digital detritus in search of old workshop plans. I hate doing this kind of thing. I do almost anything to avoid it. I do this because as long as I don't actually look into my archives, I can delude myself into thinking that they exist. There is something perversely paradoxical in my seeming inability to organise things properly. It's enough to think 'this is quite good, I should make sure to keep it' and then all hope of actually doing so is gone. I don't know how to ratify my allergy to proper record keeping with a simultaneous and contradictory need to assert my presence on the world. That's a big tug and pull for me. I want to leave foot prints, so long as my feet aren't artificially weighed down. I want to wear a groove, but only the kind that allows for divergence. So yeah. Whatever that's about, my (lack of) record-keeping is a physical manifestation of it. Happily, th

Beautifully Confused

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