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Soul Stories
Summer workshop--July 28.29.30 FRI 7-10 SAT & SUN 9-4
a single memory opens the door to a world of movement, painting, storytelling magic
The Soul Stories method has sparked writing, performance and visual art, personal and professional experiments, journeys. Embodied memory gives expression to more of your story, freeing it from fixations, channeling it as source of creative vitality, mining it for potent images that reveal your personal style and vision.
"Where the bee sucks, there suck I." --William Shakespeare
$150-$225 sliding scale
please RSVP soon if interested. 6 people max / 3 spots left
email me back for more information and details
STUDIO is in a new art complex being created by the visionary developer, Ken Unkeles--
Marine Ironworks Building. #345. Thank you, Ken, for keeping art alive in Portland.
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The Hillsboro Story
In 1955 these Mothers and Children walked past my 3rd grade classroom window everyday all year, rain or shine. Why can't they come in? What's going on? Fragments and versions of this desegregation battle, the town's soul story, would appear now and then, like puzzle pieces, clues to a bigger mystery that nagged at my own soul. In 2003 I returned to Hillsboro, Ohio to follow the clues and begin a journey that has taken me deeper into memory and history and the realms in-between, that led to the creation of two 2 multi-voiced dance/theatre works that toured the nation --No Strangers Here Today and The Hillsboro Story, now woven together into a story and a backstory, a Hillsboro film noir, that reveals more of this mystery and brings these powerful protest stories to the present moment.
I shot the photo on Walnut Street, where the Mothers and the Children marched outside my window, where Webster School used to stand, named after Daniel Webster, the silver tongued orator who talked out of both sides of his mouth on the issue of slavery. Well, he's gone and the school's gone. Elsie Steward Young, the last living Marching Mother, 101 years old, is seated far right. Her kin go back to the union between Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson, and she doesn't waffle. "Unity," she tells me. "It's remarkable the things you can accomplish when you work together. Patience. Encouragement. Be patient." Here we are on location, where the early Civil Rights protest was staged, now an empty space, open to possibility. Here is my Beloved Community who have taught me true lessons over our years of sharing time together. "I didn't have sense enough to be afraid," Elsie remembers. We laugh and take a ride in the country and she tells me another story. "What? You eloped!?"
In 2015 I was invited by the Highland County Historical Society members to share my work, and to invite my friends and collaborators to join me. When (L-R top) Viginia Harewood, Eleanor Cumberland, Teresa Williams, Carolyn Goins, and Joyce Kittrell took their place at the table to tell their stories, the room changed. The dusty old portraits of the settlers shifted, light filled the room, the kleenex box was passed around. This was the beginning of a project the museum had envisioned, directed by Kati Burwinkle. The Lincoln School Project includes a documentary film, installation, and finally, the archiving of this great American history in the county where it was born.
Every Memory holds a million stories, and each one is a Soul Story, and Together our soul stories begin to heal what is broken, become threads in the Great Web of Life.
"The end is forgiveness. The end is reconciliation. The end is the creation of the Beloved Community."
--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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