Queen

September 23 – October 2, 2016

Grandmothers hold memory and loose memory and lose memory; they have a broad understanding of love – a wide geography that one may get lost in. A grandmother suffers the loss of a grandchild, navigates grief, and retrieves memory – sharing it in a new world run by, loved by, kept whole by a solidarity of grandmothers.

The emotional heart of the piece is fired by compassion for the death of so many young African Americans at the hand of civil power. A robust cohort of collaborators, horizontally arrayed, present a full-length puppet-play that inverts a convention, putting a grandmother’s wandering, transformation and adventures at the center (rather than leaving her in the parentheses).

As Petrus writes: “What are all of the layers of a grandmother? For real. The woman who nurtured your nurturer? Grandmother is a force of earned warriorhood and sensual wildness.” Who better to lead us through the landscape of trauma and grief toward creative evolutions into healing?

Co-written by Erik Ehn and Junauda Petrus
Directed by Alison Heimstead
Narrated by Laurie Carlos
Musical Direction by Taylor Johnson and Matt Larson
Created by the Ensemble

*Star charts by Roger Sinnott & Rick Fienberg and released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

This project was supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.