Wow. This is embarrassing. We haven’t posted here since late April. I could say that May was spent getting ready to travel, and June was spent on the road, and July was spent recovering. And August was a lost month like always, and then September showed up and everything in the world was suddenly going on as the arts community and all the little tangential ways we’re both connected to it swung into it’s 2016/17 season…

But really, project-wise, things have been incubating. No, that’s not even the right word.  Things have been… resting. Like you’re supposed to rest the steak after it’s cooked. Unlike any other project I’ve ever worked on, INVOCATION doesn’t call for or need much rehearsal. We don’t memorize lines. We spent some time late in the summer finalizing the text, but all it needed was finalizing. The writing bit has long been done.

We brainstormed some ideas re: graphic representations of the evolving soundscape. We changed a few story titles and made notes to change a couple of pictures. I still need to do a final scoring on my script, and we need a few prop-y things, like ping pong balls. And fishbowls.

But most of what’s involved in getting this show ready for performance is venue-specific. And we have a great venue for the premiere. And we’ll load in tomorrow. And then we’ll commence to play with sound levels and white balances and all the geekery of fine-tuning the audio and visual experience for maximum impact in the beautiful old sanctuary room that is the performance space at URBAN-15.

It feels like a fabulous luxury to not be scrambling, with just weeks to go, to put everything into place. I am angst-free and simply looking forward to the moment when the lights go down and I get to read you little stories in the dark, lit only by the pictures pulsing slowly above our heads, a hypnotically-animated picture book.

We continue to struggle with how to talk about this piece. It stubbornly resists fitting itself into any nicely-labled genre box. As the time for publicity pushes is upon us, I find myself torn between pride and despair at our creation’s unwillingness to condense itself into something like an “elevator speech.”

INVOCATION brings together things I love – beautifully-crafted words, engaging images, trance-y sound, the tingle and exchange of live performance, the voyeuristic intimacy of the amplified voice, spaces made sacred by sweat and the sharing of creativity, and the ancient ritual of communities gathering in those spaces. It was created to do just that – to give us a chance to bring all those beloved things together. It invokes these things. We invoked them through its creation. INVOCATION is, exactly what it says it is. It is a call to the things I love to make themselves manifest in my life.

And it worked.