STORY TIME
(folk tales, myths, narratives)
NEW CIRCADIA
“ Bird Man and Bison”, Lascaux Cave Painting, Southwest France (approx.17,300 BP)
Once Upon a time…
Common oral narrative opening phrase for folk and fairy tales, origin unknown
...As the head of the harbour, there is an olive tree with spreading leaves, and nearby is a cave that is shaded, and pleasant, and sacred to the nymphs who are called the Nymphs of the Wellsprings...and there is water forever flowing. It has two entrances, one of them facing the North Wind, where people can enter, but the one facing toward the South Wind has more divinity. That is the way of the immortals, and no men enter that way….
Odyssey 13.102-112, Homer, Heavenly Caves, Reflections on the Garden Grotto, Naomi Miller, 1982
…the value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time…
The StoryTeller, Walter Benjamin, 1926
…Story is older than writing, older, perhaps, than permanent settlement. The story of stories emerges from fragmentary prehistory of barely discernible tools – chips of knapped flint, fired clay, charred wood – and stories figure the walls of Neolithic caves with hunts and hands, pointing up the possibility that story is, itself, a primordial tool…
Homo fabula, Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture, Paul Emmons and Luc Phinney, 2017
The narratives of the journey to the underworld, be they mythological or historical, are some of the most lasting and persistent metaphors of discovery. To go underground is to enter a space and time where the subterranean holds an imaginative power. As a supernatural place, the underworld is a site inhabited by deities, spirits and gods in which conceptions of time, like lithic time, give the earth a symbolic significance. In secular or historical narratives, the earth underground is a material natural entity to be “mined” by adventurers, explorers, and scientists. Natural time acquires a narrative that challenges mythical and biblical time. Yet the underworld/underground facilitation of cyclical versus linear narratives of time served very real ground-level interests whether in offering a supernatural structuring of phenomena or in depicting a compliant and inert nature readily available for material gain.
EVENTS
Performance, Saturday, January 25
Family Pajama Party
featuring Fay & Fluffy
Head into the New Circadia cave for storytime with drag stars Fay Slift & Fluffy Soufflé. Come in your pajamas and take a nap after storytime.
Fay Slift + Fluffy Soufflé have been doing drag storytime since June 2016. Based in Toronto, they have been fortunate to do countless local events, as well as hitting the road for adventures beyond the city. Their special events focus on books, songs, and include lots of laughs to show that Reading is FUN-damental! We especially want to support families with LGBTQ2S parent(s) and gender variant children, and read culturally diverse books, by providing a supportive and inclusive environment focused on fun! Everyone is welcome!
Persephone, Ella Gant, ink on paper (2020)
Workshop, Wednesday April 1
Performance, Thursday April 2
Persephone's Return/ Persephone's Revenge
with Kay Turner and performers
Persephone's Return/Persephone's Revenge unstitches the famous Greek mother-daughter myth from its patriarchal legacy, giving it a #MeToo interpretation for the 21st century. New York-based artist and folklorist Kay Turner will lead a workshop and discussion followed by a performance. During her interactive performance the audience members will descend into "the underworld" for in-person encounters with characters from her revamped Persephone myth.
Participating artists: Moe Angelos, Simla Civelek, Yael Dobkin, Elizabeth Fraser, Ella Gant, Elizabeth Insogna, Tracy Tidgwell, Joy Xiang, Jamie Zarowitz
Kay Turner, an artist and folklorist, has been making feminist, lesbian, and queer performance and music works of various kinds for over 40 years. Her current performance and writing project, ongoing since 2012, is called What a Witch. It looks at maligning, misogynistic interpretations of the witch and performs reversals of their negative misapprehensions.
Turner holds a PhD in folklore from the University of Texas at Austin. She is the past president (2015-2018) of the American Folklore Society. Since 2002 she has been an adjunct professor in Performance Studies at NYU, where she teaches courses on gender and queer theory, temporality, ghosts and their ontologies, fairy tale performance, and oral narrative theory.
Turner's books include Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars (New York and London: Thames and Hudson); Baby Precious Always Shines: Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (New York: St. Martin's Press); and Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms (with Pauline Greenhill; Wayne State University Press). Turner's current book project, What a Witch, is a companion to her performance project of the same title. In advance of this book’s publication, she has published several essays in leading scholarly journals, including the Journal of American Folklore and Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy Tale Studies.
Hekate’s Hanging Tree for Persephone’s Wounds, Magical Pomegranates, Elizabeth Insogna, 2020, glazed ceramic, artemisias, dimensions variable.
Meshes of the Afternoon, film still
Film Screening, Friday, April 24
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
A classic short film with a surreal attitude and a strange, circular story.
Director: Maya Deren, 14min.
Requiem for a Dream (2000)
Drug addiction causes a family to sink into delusion and degradation in this critically acclaimed film by the director of Black Swan and Mother.