FLOODESIGN

silence, or speaking in the hush of late-night microphone tones. I have dwelt in the very different vows of silence entailed by writing and by dancing; they are the finest, richest forms of thinking I have access to. I've also trafficked in the silences of periodically turning away from performing; I understand this impulse in relation to navigations of ambition, vanity, the privacy of home and the question of how best to spend the hours of my one and only life. But maybe this habitual pivot to and from making myself public also might illuminate the weird conjunctions of publicity and privacy at the heart of my theater of reading, a room that aspires to hold, for both performing and observing participants, an Orphic crossing from having our being in public to having our being in private and back again. A book, transplanted to the soil of theater, grows a new form. It is not simply a question of retelling; it is no longer a literary body. To take something very old and unfamiliar to most and reanimate it onstage without losing its spectral textual nature requires something different from dramatic form. (Not that a book can't be dramatized, but dramatizing wants to remove the aura of the print book and replace it with immediacy.) If drama in the classic Aristotelian formulation arrives at pity and awe, I think the animated book delivers us to a clearing made up of both text and action. The knowledge of the book as a book fringes the experience, ports its long history into the room. The unrepeatable, time-space-limited group experience of the live event intersects the book's long, radiant vectors of reception. Maybe? Anyway, what I came to think, as I wrote this meditation, is that the reason I both make a performance of reading and publish these performing books, and the reason why the room of performance for me constantly yields the pivot toward solitude and silence, is that a book, printed and multiplied, distributed and cataloged, brought into existence in order to be available to an unknown future reader, is both an act of publication, of making public, and a channel of intimacy — temporary domestic space, even. A book is a publication and also a privacy. And I love both things; I treasure both things. So I learned to mine these two venues of the theater and the book for their counter-tendencies: for the privacy latent in group experience, a privacy heightened and held by the group's shared attention; and for the speculative, imagined, public co-presence latent in the page, its love for its future, its stranger, its listener, its reader, its audience. CODA I shared this writing with the composer, performer and writer Kate Soper and asked what she thought about this traffic between read- ing and performance making, how she sensed the presence of the source text in her "Romance." Here's what she wrote in response: "Transforming 'The Romance of the Rose,' the epic, multi-authored, medieval French poem, into 'The Romance of the Rose,' the contemporary opera for seven voices, ensemble and electronics, has presented some unique challenges. Some of the usual problems of adapting a work of literature to the stage are muted: there is not much interiority in the original poem. Others persist: there is also not much action. What there is is a dazzling display of extroverted thought and an explosion of multidimensional allegory. And the best way to perform thought and allegory is through music. To abuse Karinne Keithley Syers' opening metaphor, I travelled the two-way street between the source material and the opera with the car radio blaring. Music makes connections across galaxies of abstraction: like reading, it places thought in time and therefore turns it into action. Of course, there is actual action in the opera too, as well as funny jokes, and dramatic irony, and vocoders and torch songs and people from our world who go on transformative journeys. But I've tried, in writing a new story from the bones of this old poem, to preserve the feeling I had reading it for the first time: the feeling of stumbling into an outlandishly strange yet oddly, profoundly familiar world and accepting it automatically — like reading a book, like watching an opera, like falling in love." A BOOK, TRANSPLANTED TO THE SOIL OF THEATER, GROWS A NEW FORM. IT IS NOT SIMPLY A QUESTION OF RETELLING; IT IS NO LONGER A LITERARY BODY. TO TAKE SOMETHING VERY OLD AND UNFAMILIAR TO MOST AND REANIMATE IT ONSTAGE WITHOUT LOSING ITS SPECTRAL TEXTUAL NATURE REQUIRES SOMETHING DIFFERENT FROM DRAMATIC FORM. ILLUSTRATION FOR "ROMAN DE LA ROSE" 1475 21 | PEAKPERFS.ORG

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