Conception, Direction, Choreography, Scenography, Performance

A humorous autobiographical dance theatre drawing from Maeshiba’s research about “space, body, and language” in Tokyo and Czech Republic.

These are pieces I did right after September 11th and in the following year or so.

There are four works in this group that I think of as the four emotional seasons of grappling with the event and all its ramifications to our world.

I often start the process of creating a piece with a particular piece of music that invokes something in me. Writing and creating For That Which Returns was no different but it happened in a strange chronology.
I first met musician Helen Chadwick in Punta Uva, on the southern coast of Costa Rica in October 2010. We had been working on Teatro Abya Yala’s intense all female production of Vacio at different times. Rest from the project brought us both to Punta Uva at the same time. We were told that we would no doubt meet one another and become fast friends, and indeed that is exactly what happened. Both of us independent artists (Helen from the UK), pioneering new forms in our trained back rounds and about the same age. In such an idyllic place, we found ourselves talking about how the recession in the U.K. for her and in the U.S. for me was influencing how we created and the subject matter we were choosing. We talked about our age and our energy and we talked about our parents aging, the cycles we were experiencing in ourselves as daughters becoming mothers to our parents and what that was doing to what and how we created as well. I returned to the states to a phone message from Arachne Aerial Arts. Andrea Burkholder & Sharon Whiting were interested in collaborating on a large project, perhaps a full length theater piece. Our conversations were many but led to the myth of Persephone and Demeter and the cycles of mothers and daughters. It was as if Helen was in my studio and the myth was following me from Costa Rica waiting for some response.
This piece has been in process for almost 2 years. In this time it seems as if Demeter and Persephone have come alive in our lives and taken form in metaphor as well as in reality. Scripting the work has often been arduous, the rehearsal schedules challenging, and the process of forming one world of the play with performers from different skill sets (aerial dance and aerial theater) was a major push under the watchful eye of director Bryce Butler. Through it all however, the work has been about finding truth, connection in our own techniques, cycles, and the importance of story telling. We often doubt the importance of our own story; we lose the fact that our social imagination is not actually fueled by Face book or Twitter but in something much more intimate and at the same time universal. This piece is attempts to combine physical craft with story, cycles, myth and metal. We hope this work may inspire an awareness that we are tied to the planet as we are tied to our own families and that we are continually cycling into seasons of our own that match the planet. Call you mother. Take a moment to feel your connection to season, soil, and soul. Written by Mara Neimanis, Featuring Andrea Burkholder, Sharon Witing, Mara Neimanis, Directed by Bryce Butler who also collaborated on script, Sculpture by Tim Scofield, Music by Helen Chadwick.