Suchergebnisse

Embodying change is never easy, especially when our history is often lost or overlooked. Performance allows us to reenact, reexperience, reclaim and bring those moments into the future. In 1973, a group of hippies moved into a beautiful house in the Oakland/Berkeley Hills. We didn't know then that we would become a queer family that would endure many personal and political crises, including the AIDS epidemic and the destruction of our house in the great firestorm of 1991. Shifting through the ashes, stories emerge of the personal struggles and politics of the times that have much to offer us today, when we strive once again to do it differently. The following piece is an excerpt from the beginning of the play, which juxtaposes our early experiences with some of the more stark realities the fire would come to symbolize as the years progressed.

This paper explores the transformation of oral histories into a play about the founding of San Francisco Women's Building based on extensive interviews. My impetus for writing She Rises Like a Building to the Sky was to portray the kind of grass roots feminist organization primarily composed of lesbians that made up a large part of the second wave of the Women's Movement in the 1970's and early 1980's. The evolution of She Rises is discussed from three positionalities I occupied over an extensive period of time: oral historian, playwright and eventual community member. Excerpts from She Rises are used to illustrate the lessons I learned in the process of creating this work. I will discuss my self-collaboration in terms of the oral historian's concern for fidelity, the playwright's desire to bring such material to life whether by fact or fiction, and the community member's fears of how others will view this rendition of their stories. The behind the scenes dramas reveal as much as the play itself about the challenges and rewards of undertaking such projects.