MISSING MEMAW

“The pieces making up this evening ache with gently dissonance, paying rueful tribute to the power of loneliness to inspire art." - Chicago Reader

"Crawford is a performer and a writer of uncommon delicacy and insight, and in director Stephan Mazurek's hands she's radiant." - Chicago Sun-Times

Missing Memaw, is a three-part exploration of isolation and the compulsion to create beauty in a world of resounding loneliness.  While all three segments are based upon this theme, each approaches it from a different perspective.  Together, they comprise a non-traditional, multi-media experience combining original writing, music, film, and an adaptation of the last story written by Katherine Mansfield before her death. 

Part One: Missing Memaw

written and performed by Loren Crawford, with music composed for Appalachian dulcimer by Nancy Johnson and projections by Stephan Mazurek

The title piece was born out of a writing assignment that Mazurek gave Crawford, his friend and longtime artistic partner.  Crawford received a series of photographs Mazurek had taken, without any information regarding the context of the pictures.  She was to look at each photo individually and write what came to mind.  Crawford learned later that the photographs (now included in the performance as slide projections) were of the Heidelberg Project in Detroit, an effort by an inner-city artist to reclaim his neglected, junk-strewn neighborhood by transforming the trash into outdoor art.  At the time of the writing assignment, Crawford was working as an artist-in-residence at a psychiatric treatment center for boys.  Her day-to-day work with these fragile, traumatized children affected her perspective on the photographs, with her writings evolving into a meditation on loss, loneliness, and the search for beauty. 

Part Two: The Isolation of Desire --a Ruffian Pictures film

by Stephan Mazurek, with music by Richard Parker & k-rakos

‘Cinedance’ is an emerging new genre in film production, a non-static and ground-breaking method of filming dance.  This piece offers a cinematic translation of XSIGHT! Performance Group’s live dance performance, “Untold Secrets,” filmed on an abandoned estate outside of Chicago.  The Isolation of Desire is an elegant and riveting exploration of how sexual longing can separate us as irrevocably as it can bring us together.

Part Three: The Canary

by Katherine Mansfield, performed by Loren Crawford

“The Canary” was the last short story written by Katherine Mansfield before her death in 1923 after battling tuberculosis.  Never meant to be published, it is a warm farewell written as a gift to a friend.  In her brief life, the maverick Mansfield transformed the art of the short story.  Her friend Virginia Woolf once said Mansfield’s was “the only writing I have ever been jealous of.”