Through the Woods and Home Again

I had tea with the lovely miss Lindsay Gilmour this morning. She and I will be working together for the piece I'm making for the show. I've worked with her before and I just love the way we look things in such different ways. As a dancer, she's so in her body and tells you her story through movement. I'm always in my head and I suppose I tell my story through stitches. We spoke about narratives - the stories we tell about ourselves and the stories culture tells. Her husband is a death penalty lawyer writing about the importance of telling the story of the person you're defending - what is their narrative and how did that lead them to where they are? She also recalled something from The Power of Myth about how each culture has it's own story that members try and live up to. We wondered about our culture's story. How much of it had been taken over by Hollywood. "Love" defined by the latest Romantic Comedy and not by the wise. Between Hollywood and death row, what are the archetypes we're creating I wondered.

I've been reading From The Beast to the Blond a non-fiction book about story tellers and fairy tales. The archetype of woman as story teller goes back almost to the beginning. Fluctuating between wise woman to the "old wives tales" she tells us what we need to know in order to make it through the woods. She's full of gossip and wisdom. She's an oracle and a whore. She's trouble.

With Lindsay, I would like to explore this storyteller in other cultures, mainly Tibitian and Indian. I would like to see how they carry the burden of memory - the history of the culture embedded within the story - before there were ways of recording it. How are we still burdened by our culture? How can the past story tellers give us what we need to know about our own time. There is more to it then happily ever after. Even they knew that.