YOUR STORY WAS THIS
Premiere: October 2015
ODC Theater, San Francisco
Your Story Was This, an immersive performance installation, integrates Liss Fain’s choreography with three poems by Jane Hirshfield. The underlying themes of migration and unknowability—where your life will land, making choices and diving into the unknown, and the impossibility of understanding fully another person—are emphasized by the installation’s two differently sized and barely connected spaces. Migrations, internal and physical, are the root of the choreography. Jane Hirshfield’s poems, spoken in repetition by three actors as voice over in Dan Wool’s score, have an astute balance between seeing and describing, feeling and accepting. The outward simplicity of the poems’ language unmasks the deep emotionality of the subject. Her quiet, carefully aimed thrust of emotion is magnified by the spare and powerful images and the finely crafted structure that frames her thoughts.
VIDEO TRAILER
Choreography: Liss Fain
Text: Jane Hirshfield
Installation & Lighting Design: Matthew Antaky
Music: Dan Wool
Projection Design: Frédéric O. Boulay
Costume Design: Mary Domenico
Original Cast:
Aidan DeYoung, Katharine Hawthorne, Megan Kurashige, Shannon Kurashige
Produced in association with ODC Theater
Additional performances:
Mill Valley Library, Mill Valley (April 2016)
Photos: Benjamin Hersh
Video: Rapt Productions