Declarations

Précis

In Declarations, acclaimed playwright-director Jordan Tannahill reckons with his mother’s mortality, and his own, through a joyful and moving attempt to capture the objects, sensations, and experiences that makes up a life. Through a lyrical text and physical score of choreographed gestures, five performers chronicle a life pulled through time, encountering meteorological phenomena, mythology, political calamity, pop culture, and everyday happenstance along the way. What accumulates is a staggering archive of sensations, memories, and voices asserting that here lived, for a time, a woman.

Full Synopsis

Declarations is a lyrical piece for five performers. At once playful and moving, it is a meditation on the objects, images, and sensations that make up a life.

The set consists of a white square and four suspended florescent lights. A performer enters and begins making a series of declarative statements beginning with the words ‘This is…’ This is a pressed bruise. This is Greta Garbo’s smile. This is the smell of Windex. For every statement she performs an accompanying score of simple, improvised gestures. The gestures are sometimes illustrative, sometimes abstract, sometimes comic, but are always spontaneously generated afresh each performance. Four more performers gradually join her onstage until there is a small chorus of voices and gestures. Recurring threads of narrative emerge — a conversation with a lover, the pending death of a mother, a prom night car crash, ecological and societal collapse — alongside meteorological phenomenon, mythology, political calamity, pop culture, and everyday happenstance. What gradually accumulates is a staggering archive of images, sensations, and objects of a life-lived.