Declarations. Jordan Tannahill

      Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

      LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

      Tannahill, Jordan, author

      Declarations / Jordan Tannahill.

      A play.

      Issued in print and electronic formats.

      ISBN 978-1-55245-359-9 (softcover).

      I. Title.

      PS8639.A577D43 2018 C812’.6 C2017-905082-6

      Declarations is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 544 9 (EPUB), 978 1 77056 545 6 (PDF).

      Purchase of the print version of this book entitles you to a free digital copy. To claim your ebook of this title, please email [email protected] with proof of purchase. (Coach House Books reserves the right to terminate the free digital download offer at any time.)

       For my mother

       Playwright’s Note

      Three years ago my mother was told she had less than three years to live. The news shattered me. My grief was all-consuming and yet I knew it wasn’t special. We all live with the inevitability of losing everyone and everything. But how do we do this? It suddenly struck me as the most impossible task. And that we should continue living in the face of this impossibility seemed to me both an exquisite and somewhat absurd act of defiance.

      Shortly after receiving my mother’s news, I was on a six-hour plane ride home to visit her. While 35,000 feet in the air, I looked down at my hand and thought: this is my left hand. I whispered it to myself. This is my left hand. It felt edifying. As if, with those words, I was declaring: for now, this too still exists. I wrote Declarations in a single, fevered sitting on that plane ride, as if by picking through the fragments of myself – images, sounds, sensations – I would come to understand what constituted a life. Perhaps so as to better understand what it meant to lose one.

      Declarations is driven by the desire to articulate the entirety of a life and the inherent impossibility of doing so. In a sense, all art occupies the space between human experience and our sublime failure to fully articulate human experience. I wanted to create a piece that spoke to that. To create an archive, fated to be woefully incomplete, of a life lived. In this case the life is mine, but through their embodiment of the text it also becomes that of the five performers.

      Accompanying the text is a gestural score: the performers spontaneously generate gestures that embody and further illuminate each declaration. While the text is fixed, the performers’ improvised movement keeps this archive a living one, changing night after night. In this way, the text passes through the prism of each performer’s lived experience and refracts back a wholly unique and personal vision of a life.

      A younger, more cynical version of myself would have been reluctant to say this, but fuck it: for me, live performance is a spiritual act. I do think of the theatre as a kind of temple. We go to the temple to grapple with the fundamental questions of the human condition. And for me, Declarations is a ritual for the temple. A means of processing the terror of death through the joyful evocation of life.

      Jordan Tannahill

      December 2017

       Performance History

      Declarations premiered at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre on January 23, 2018. The production was directed by Jordan Tannahill, with the following creative team:

      1: Liz Peterson

      2: Jennifer Dahl

      3: Danielle Baskerville

      4: Philip Nozuka

      5: Rob Abubo

      Lighting Designer: Kimberly Purtell

      Technical Director: Greg Dougherty

      Stage Manager: A. J. Laflamme

      Assistant Stage Manager: Ashley Ireland

      Original vocal composition by Philip Nozuka, with the ensemble

      Producer: Lynanne Sparrow

      Technical Director: Greg Dougherty

      Production Manager: Heather Landon

      Director of Production: Lee Milliken

      Senior Head Technician: Sally Roberts

      Head of Wardrobe: Ming Wong

      Artistic Director: Matthew Jocelyn

      Interim Managing Director and Executive Producer: Sherrie Johnson

       The Gestural Score

      While the gestural score in Declarations is spontaneously generated each night, we arrived at fifteen rules for what the gestures could and could not be. I would encourage directors to use these rules as a starting point for their own interpretation of the piece, but also to feel at liberty to dispense with some and discover others.

      • Gestures should be a genuine attempt to communicate the essence of each declaration.

      • Simple is best.

      • No acting.

      • Avoid dance-like movements.

      • Avoid facial expressions.

      • Reset to a neutral physicality when possible, facing outward toward audience.

      • Sometimes you will speak the declaration first, and then perform the gesture. Other times, you will speak the declaration and perform the gesture at the same time. It will largely depend on how quickly the gesture occurs to you.

      • For every five or so simple gestures (i.e., one motion of the arm or hand), you may have a slightly longer, multi-part gesture (perhaps one that moves you through the space).

      • ‘Runs’ are encouraged. ‘Runs’ are sequences in which you flow seamlessly between one declaration/gesture and another, as if each one were building off the last.

      • Very occasionally you can make a sound to accompany a declaration/gesture, but only if that sound spontaneously arises from the execution of the gesture.

      • No imitations of butterflies or birds.

      • No finger symbols (i.e., a gun, a peace sign, the middle finger, etc.)

      • Avoid pointing at the thing you are referring to; embody it.

      • A variety of movement and stillness is crucial.

      • So is levity and play.