“What do they know about colors?

What do they know about Queens?”

To witness Ezra Dickinson’s newest performance is to be invited into the birthing room, to be led by the hand behind the white curtain to witness raw emergence and then, after one birth, a rebirth, and another, and another.

Response from Michelle Peñaloza, OtB Writers Corps Ambassador

Place your feet upon my chest                       leap forward blind

Stop stop stop              get it right, her therapist’s here

let’s begin again

            the fourth border: a cylinder refracted in fringe

Verdensteatret Bridge over Mud is a perfect theater, the one that reminds of theater Edward Gordon Craig’s evokes in his essay “The Actor and the Ubermarionette.” “If you can find in nature a new material, one which has never been used by man to give form to his thoughts,” writes Craig, “then you can say that you are on the high road towards creating a new art. For you have found that by which you can create it.” (EGC, “The Actor and the Ubermarionette”, The Mask, Vol. 1. p.

There’s a 1929 painting by the American artist Arthur Dove that I’ve loved for a long time, though I’ve only ever seen it in reproduction. It’s called Fog Horns, and though you can read in it landscape and layers of atmosphere and distance, it is as much about sound as it is space, as Dove’s title signals. Concentric ovals suggest the way sound travels, starting loud and concentrated at a center and then softening as it moves out from its source, waves of sound over and overlapping waves of water. 

Verdensteatret’s Bridge Over Mud begins with the same intention as the Annunciation but is different from the Latin version of Gabriel’s announcement to Virgin Mary. It begins, however, with the announcement of the arrival of glorious life.