A Petit Reflection on "The Episodes" Performance

I went to the last San Francisco performance of "The Episodes" by Brontez Purnell last Saturday night. The performers: Brontez Purnell, Anthony R. Lucas, and Sophia Wang. It was a great piece integrating voice, writing, music, projection art, and dance.

The performance had a lot of layers, but I am going to express my views on one particular layer I really enjoyed. The topic of WRITING. Wang sat on a small desk-chair (you'd normally see at a school) with an intimidating typewriter in front of her. She typed away while Purnell's voice came through the speakers. He told us a story about a lost love and murder (awesome). There was a pile of wrinkled pieces of papers around her body, and every now and then she would melt onto the floor and into the pile of papers. Meanwhile Purnell did cartwheels in the corner of the room and Lucas swept off the papers into a neat pile around Wang.  These are some images I saw that connected with me:

• Characters coming to life: Purnell and Lucas surrounding the writer. 
• Wrinkled papers of old drafts overpowering the writers' space.
• Holding onto darlings.
• Melting into paper to representing losing control of a story or thought process.
• Purnell doing cartwheels in the corner: obsessively repeating the start of a sentence expecting a different result.
• Getting lost in imagery. 
• Drowning in your writing and ideas. 

For me, this section was the highlight of the performance. Check out this write up by The Off Center: http://theoffcenter.org/2013/03/03/the-episodes-a-performance-event-by-brontez-purnell/ 
This is not the last performance in the bay. "The Episodes" will be going to Oakland next. Check it out!

#supportthearts #weirdlywonderful

The Off Center: http://theoffcenter.org