OPENING PRE-SHOW RECITALS
JACKIE PEREZ GRATZ, solo electric cello improvisation
MERLIN COLEMAN, original songs on cello

In these performances, three women portray three aspects of one woman
-- Artist, Mother, Soul Torn Between -- through a series of isolated ritual actions
that gradually converge: an artist creates a painting, a mother embodies a
painting come to life, the Soul torn between Mother and Artist performs
her symbolic dance with a fourth entity -- Embryo (Nick Walker).



FELECIA FAULKNER as the Mother and SYLVI ALLI as the Artist

NICK WALKER as "Embryo"

Rilke (1875-1926) wrote "Requiem For a Friend" as a tribute to his friend
and painter, Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907), who suddenly died
eighteen days after giving birth to her first child.

"I have my dead, and I have let them go, and was amazed to see them so contented,
so soon at home in being dead, so cheerful, so unlike their reputation. Only you return;
brush past me, loiter, try to knock against something, so that the sound
reveals your presence. Don't take from me what I am slowly learning."

"Once ritual lament would have been chanted; women would have been paid
to beat their breasts and howl all night, when all is silent.
Where can we find such customs now ?"

"...I'm sure you have gone astray if you are moved to homesickness for anything
in this dimension. We transform these Things; they aren't real, they are only
the reflections upon the polished surface of our being. I thought you were
much further on. It troubles me that you should stray back, you, who have
achieved more transformation than any other woman..."

from the translation by Stephen Mitchell
and used with his kind permission

"REQUIEM FOR A FRIEND"
The text in its entirety

 

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Director's Notes

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Antero Alli

Rilke's "Requiem For a Friend" is a lyrical lament of considerable depth and substance and, one of the poet's most personal prose works. I am compelled by its narrative structure -- which doesn't read like "a poem" as much as a stream of consciousness -- and its subtle powers of invocation; not just to Paula Modersohn-Becker (the artist he wrote it for) but, also to Rilke's own poetic muses.

This will be my second paratheatrical staging of Stephen Mitchell's translation of "REQUIEM" (the first was in Seattle 1990). Since that initial immersion, a rich subtext has been revealed to me in Rilke's confessions and convictions around death, loss and the transformation of love into art...a kind of alchemy Rilke sometimes called "the greater circulation" (also the title I have chosen for my current feature film project which includes footage from these performances; click this for movie details).

The paratheatrical processes we underwent to arrive at this performance insists on metamorphosis. Each night all of the performers are serving sources accessed within their Body and developed over an eight week period before the performances. Sincde these "embodied sources" are spiritual events and not choreographed, each night's performances differ from the others. The consistent thread over all four nights: The Artist paints a new self-portrait every night. The Mother explores a spectrum of forces between "mercy" and "severity" within the physical constraints of a large picture frame. The dance of the Soul Torn Between unfolds an organic cellular choreography of different forces innate to the body. The passive Embryo blindly reacts to his own birth, the Soul Torn Between until it becomes it own entity. Not theatre by any traditional definition, these performances present a living ritual theatrically framed to serve the spirit, the tone, and the form of Rilke’s text.

-- ANTERO ALLI

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Writings by and about Rilke & Paula

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Rainer Maria Rilke

RAINER MARIA RILKE AND PAULA MODERSOHN-BECKER
The stories behind their meeting (1900-1907)

POETRY OF RAINER MARIA RILKE
from multiple eras of his career

"ON LOVE & OTHER DIFFICULTIES"
two samples of writings on relationships

BRIEF BIO OF R.M.RILKE
with photos of Rilke and those who knew him

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