Footprints on the winds (a multi-media, multi-lingual, Postdramatic music-theatre script for female voices)

Abstract

This project synthesizes creative practice with reflections on the concepts and ideas informing the crafting of a script intended for staged performance. This manuscript takes the form of a postcolonial multi-media, multi-lingual "libretto" for female voices. I implement formal innovations within avant-garde performance modes in conjunction with the thematic treatment of issues emerging from postcolonial themes of power/knowledge, transformation and subjectivity. I experiment with an idiom that is polyphonic and multi-perspectival in integrating sung and spoken delivery that is inseparable from the visual world within which it is produced. I have pursued the potential for telling stories of "arrival and settling" in a manner that eschews the model of a unified linear plot (and the conventions of realism) in favour of narration that fuses the sound of the human voice situated within a landscape that is frankly declared as a stage and simultaneously something other than a public platform. The "libretto" is structured around and developed from the disparate experiences and narratives of three women whose disparate cultural identities and life styles are embedded in how they occupy different terrains and fields of interaction at marked and significant points of history. I pursue the "ordinariness" of episodes in their lives in order to test the extent to which neglected subjects and subjectivities comprise a vital part of the record of colonization. Tropes of arrival and settlement, the challenges of adaptation and transformation play out through exploring the role of language and distinctions between the media of writing and orality, speaking and singing, as much as through tensions between sound and silence, isolation and communal interaction. In addition to the manuscript and expository document, appendices chart multiple aspects of the project in order to relay the ways in which the disparate theatrical elements allow for this project to stage a meditation on movements through time and space. (Abbreviation abstract)