So now I have confessed that he is thine… Erotic Trajectories
PERFORMERS: Nina Sallinen, Rosario Campisi, Paige Tautz, Mitchell Thomas
MUSIC: James Connolly
VIDEO, COSTUMES, LIGHTS: Blagoj Micevksi
PRODUCTION: Lit Moon Theatre Company, Santa Barbara, California
VIDEO PERFORMERS: Valentino Apostolovski; Sandra Gribovska; Nikola Stevanov
CAMERA: Nikola Markovski
DIRECTION: John Blondell
When: July 25, 2021, 9 p.m.
Shakespeare’s plays are rich with the joys and perils of erotic entanglement. So are the sonnets. In this mixed media performance, a small handful of sonnets interweave to create a story of love and loss, of passion and its betrayal. Using acting, music, and visual storytelling, the performance immerses the audience in the myriad and complicated feelings of sexual love. So now I have expressed that he is thine is a poetic display of passion, attraction, sensuality and ultimate heartbreak, played by beings created for this kind of high wire act, who Antonin Artaud calls “athletes of the heart.”
So Now I Have Confessed… Erotic Trajectories is created to premiere at the Verona Shakespeare Fringe Festival. Conceived and developed by an international group of artists, it is imagined as a kind of theatrical meditation and response to the entangled passions that exist in many of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In those sonnets, the poet exposes the consequences of his love for a young man, the poet’s attachment to his mistress, and the complications that result when mistress seduces young man. We have decided to complicate matters even further – added a female poet, with incumbent relationships, which mirror the geometry of the Shakespearean original. She is in love with a young man; she has her own female lover; and she is devasted with young man and lover hook up. What results is two entangled triangles. On another level, the show can be experienced as pieces of a fragmented self, with the figures represented actually projections of a fractured psyche. The show uses original video captured specifically for this event, shot in and around the environs of Bitola, North Macedonia; audio recorded in Santa Barbara, California; and live action, created on the spot in Verona. We have tried to create a big show in little time, with artists from four different countries, five different cities, all under the veil of Covid. It is created as an open text. Audiences will reflect on their own experiences, wonder about their own impressions, and weave their own stories. Afterward, we’ll all talk about it in the bar. Oh, wait. Can we do that yet? Only Time will tell.
