SHIFT~ performance salon
in collaboration with the Winona Outdoor Collaborative
presents:
BLUE AWAKEN/ings
with Mary Jo Klinker & Sharon Mansur
Levee Park, Winona, MN, Dakota land
September 9, 2022
A collaborative dance performance and feminist exploration of Maggie Nelson's book Bluets
“Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.” ~Maggie Nelson, Bluets
Performance photos and video by: Sydney Swanson
Photos in visual installation: see credits in slideshow
in collaboration with the Winona Outdoor Collaborative
presents:
BLUE AWAKEN/ings
with Mary Jo Klinker & Sharon Mansur
Levee Park, Winona, MN, Dakota land
September 9, 2022
A collaborative dance performance and feminist exploration of Maggie Nelson's book Bluets
“Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.” ~Maggie Nelson, Bluets
Performance photos and video by: Sydney Swanson
Photos in visual installation: see credits in slideshow
Sharon Mansur (she/her) is a SWANA/Arab American dance and interdisciplinary experimental
artist, educator, curator, and community mover and shaker based in Winona, MN, Dakota land. She loves creating artistic opportunities for people to connect and engage. Sharon is currently the director of The Cedar Tree Project, amplifying regional, national and international creative voicesfrom the SWANA/Arab diaspora, and curator of SHIFT~ performance salons.
artist, educator, curator, and community mover and shaker based in Winona, MN, Dakota land. She loves creating artistic opportunities for people to connect and engage. Sharon is currently the director of The Cedar Tree Project, amplifying regional, national and international creative voicesfrom the SWANA/Arab diaspora, and curator of SHIFT~ performance salons.
Text quotes and bibliography for BLUE AWAKEN/ings
(Sharon and Mary Jo’s original prose not included):
Quotes
“Of course, my ex didn’t walk me home. Instead, I wandered, drunk, from Main Street down to the railroad tracks, lay down there and listened to the quiet world. Smoked a cigarette on my back, feeling a part of the ground, one of night’s dark and lost creatures. For as long as I can remember, this has been one of my favorite feelings. To be alone in public, wandering at night, or lying close to the earth, anonymous, invisible, floating. To be ‘a man of the crowd,’ or, conversely, alone with Nature or your God. To make your claim on public space even as you feel yourself disappearing into its largesse, into sublimity. To practice for death by feeling completely empty, but somehow still alive. It’s a sensation that people have tried, in various times and places, to keep women from feeling.”
(Nelson, The Red Parts)
“Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.” (Nelson, Bluets)
“You were on your way to a seaside town, a town of much blue, where you would be spending a week with the other woman you were in love with…” (Nelson, Bluets)
“Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.” (Nelson, Bluets)
“I like to see the sun pass through the blue glass, the bottle of blue ink, the translucent blue stones. But the light is clearly destroying some of the objects or at least bleaching out their blues.” (Nelson, Bluets)
“The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love’s primal scene. That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst, choiceless. I returned there yesterday and stood again upon the mountain.” (Nelson, Bluets)
“All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.” (Nelson, Bluets)
“I am writing all this down in blue ink, so as to remember that all words, not just some, are written in water.” (Nelson, Bluets)
“A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.” (Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House)
Bibliography
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology : Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
Brown, Adrienne Maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico, California: AK Press, 2017.
Hackney, Peggy. Making Connections: Total Body Integration Through Bartenieff Fundamentals. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers, 1998.
Lowe, Andy. Natural Wonder: Why is the colour blue so rare in nature? Biodiversity Revolution, 2019. Accessed 7 September, 2022.
https://biodiversityrevolution.wordpress.com/2019/08/20/natural-wonder-why-is-the-colour-blue-so-rare-in-nature/.
Machado, Carmen Maria. In the Dream House: A Memoir. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2019.
Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Seattle: Wave Books, 2009.
---The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2016.