Performance Project #2

Sometimes a simple gesture or image can crystallize a whole story, and can be very deeply moving. Also, a whole story can be told in a series of images.

The following story is not mine; it belongs to a woman I will call Tina, who told me her experience. Tina is Jewish. Her mother, like all Jewish parents, wanted to make sure that Tina adequately understood the Holocaust and its implications. Her mother insisted that Tina watch Shoah on TV, which she did; she found it instructive and worthwhile, but she was not as deeply moved as her mother had hoped.

One fine June night Tina attended the Bar Mitzvah celebration of one of her cousins. It was a big, happy party, and everyone was having a good time. It was quite warm, and one of Tina's elderly relatives, happy and laughing, took off his jacket, under which he had on a short-sleeved shirt. Tina noticed a number tatooed on his arm. At that moment everything she had learned ``clicked,'' and she ``got'' the Holocaust.

The number on the man's arm is exactly the sort of gesture that modern film and performance seek to make. A series of images such as this one may lead us somewhere without explicitly connecting all the dots; this is the essence of montage. A series of images leading up to the image of the tatooed number, for instance, could tell Tina's story.

Your mission is to use the technique of montage to create a series of images that may seem disparate but that work together and color one another to make a coherent whole. You may wish to use a ``story'' that already exists, or one of your own. ``Story'' means, in this case, simply some thread that makes us connect the dots in a meaningful way. Stay away from complex plots. You may use movement, tableau, projected images, light, sound. Do not use words in any form.

This is not Saturday Night Live. It is also not about shocking people, but rather about moving them. This does not mean that your audience must break down into tears; being moved can be much simpler than that.

Your piece will be performed on Thursday, January 30.