Last night, marking the seventh anniversary of September 11th, I performed in Welcome to Paradise: A Requiem, a multi-disciplinary 2 hour performance here in Oslo, Norway. See: www.arequiem.net for info. The piece deals with the webs of militarism, terrorism, and doublespeak that have evolved since 9/11 and uses live music, theater, movement, and glass sculpture to obliquely address these issues.

While the piece is about these things, it has sometimes been hard to connect it to my own experience of living in an increasingly militarized US, being in New York on September 11, and wanting to mourn the violence that has followed in the name of retribution, grief, and democracy. In the first section of the piece, I have a movement score that I call the “mapping”. I found some old 1960s sewing and crocheting patterns in the former schoolhouse where we were rehearsing, and started to use them as “maps”, laying each one out on the ground and then “reading” it. I translate what I read into movement, slowly filling the floor with maps, cryptic chalk marks that I make around them, and movement that becomes increasingly complicated and agitated— a slowly growing web of “security”, indications, directions, and containment. I feel like I am plotting out the story– with these mute symbols mapping out how we came to be where we are.

Yesterday, before the opening, I had the tedious task of making colored borders with magic marker around my “maps” so they could be more visible in the performance light. I sat, on the floor of the apartment, streaming WNYC on my laptop, listening to the reading of the names in New York City, and slowly, rhythmically coloring the edges of the maps. Each name became a mark which became a part of the map– a part of an old Norwegian pattern for a skirt or blouse or patterned pillow– each tiny mark connecting a theater performance in Oslo with an all-too-real event in New York through the tentative thread of my experience.

Last night as I was performing, I remembered back to my experiences performing in public in New York right after September 11, 2001. I did three durational performances of my solo Embers, one at Union Square, one in Penn Station, and one at the Firemen’s Memorial on Riverside Drive. Read about those experiences in Taking Embers to the Street.

Here is a part of the solo that I vividly remember performing, as commuters swarmed around me at rush hour in the belly of Penn station: