Lineage is Not Linear
April's theme for Soul Food Sundays is Lineage is Not Linear
A Still from Lineage is Not Linear, my upcoming poetry & dance short film
In early 2020, when I was living in Seattle, I applied for an artist residency for Cadence, a video poetry festival hosted by the Northwest Film Forum, which would culminate in creating a piece for the 2020 Cadence Video Poetry Festival, and be premiered during that same event. I learned I received the residency. Once the pandemic grabbed the reins of time, the residency was put on hold, to emerge many months after in a remote capacity.
It took me a long time before knowing the direction of what I wanted this piece to be like. I chose to engage with a poem I crafted for a live event in 2019. The poem has steadily become one of my favorites to perform, and lingered often in my heart. And then came the visual dreaming. What was the poem to look like? Beyond my body, beyond my mouth? That question bore infinite answers. Many daydreams had. Lists made. Storyboards attempted. And I had so much fun diving into my mind to explore images. To explore another life for this poem.
Despite my excitement for creating this work, I felt such a trepidation in beginning, in making concrete steps. And once I finally had some footage to play with, I felt hesitant to begin editing. But what I find out over and over again, beginning is a compass in itself. The process is a professor, teaching me, giving myself new dreams, telling myself new angles.
So much of this journey couldn't have been planned, and remains unplanned. It is a constant listening, playing, and wreckoning. Once in a poetry workshop, one of the participants, in response to an editing exercise, said, "a poem has many lives." This poetry short film is another life of the original poem, and when I work toward translating embodied performance & written word into this other medium, I remember that --"a poem has many lives." That any decision I make in a creative process can be revisited, resurrected, altered.
Sometimes the hardest part is showing up --to the camera, to the editing software, to the work. When I sit at the coast of unsung dream, I begin to hear the song. It is not finished yet, but the melody is sweet, sweet. Stuck in my head.
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