Before COVID turned the world upside down, I was working on a new performance piece that I called Leeway. In the original description of the piece I wrote the following:

 

”Leeway will include text, choreographed movement, video projection and sound design to create an interactive world featuring five performers who have been transported to the space where the audience finds them. They are out of place, expulsed, adrift looking for a way to proceed, to find some sense of terra firma. Throughout the course of the performance we hear different fragments of stories about displacement in different voices, real and virtual.  In the unfolding of the piece a shared narrative is woven from the different fragments.  The desire with this project is to forge a coherent story/place from fragmented multiple memories of arrivals and departures – to chart a newly created course through unfamiliar terrain and encourage a sense of shared experience and incantation.”

 

When plans for live performance had to be abandoned, I wanted to stay with some of the fragments that I had begun to write and experiment with ways to make something digital with them. This is an ongoing experiment but in the following links you can view some of the material (I consider them to be ‘video poems) that we have thus far been able to make. By we, I mean several collaborators who generously recorded text for me and sent it and two student interns from Amherst College who assisted in editing the videos and working with the images in new ways. 

 

Credits:

Video, photo images and text:  Wendy Woodson

Video editing and computer-generated imagery Kalea Ramsey and Julian Brown

Voice and sound design: Zeina Nasr

Additional sound editing: Julian Brown

Additional voices: Anna Maynard, Shaneeka Harrell, Janna Goodwin

 

We still plan to present the live version in a post-pandemic future.

 

This work was made possible with the support of the Bogliasco Foundation and Amherst College (Faculty Research Award and the Greg Call fellowship program).