STORY CREATURES
A live installation by KATE HILLIARD
Presented by April 28th & 29th, 2023
Story Creatures considers the anthropological consequences of a great melt. The creative work began with a fable that I wrote during the Global Pandemic. Through movement, film, words, light, and sound, I’m examining a futuristic world that comes to life after the worst has happened. The following set of performance values have guided my decisions:
If we drain the colour, past and future collide.
If we say it differently, more people will understand.
If we do the same thing over and over and over again, maybe the ending will change..........................................................
Quietly at first, and then with fury, there was a great melt and things came crawling out of the tundra.
Ancient things that had been frozen for so long that our bodies didn’t recognize them. They multiplied and mutated, ravaging the wisdom keepers and leaving the young to mourn in puddles of nebulous expectation. The see-through creatures seeded in quiet places. Their presence could not be detected by smell or taste. Even the spirit world dissipated into gauzy shadow to avoid passing them in the air. They colonized bodies on every continent, until the rich were numb with depression and the poor collected in community centre morgues.
With foolish council, the leaders began to make rules. In time, fear and uncertainty incapacitated even the most logical folk. Some fell left and some right. The people began to plan their futures with liquid crystals and polarizers. They held recorded conferences to say “I love you”, to carry out business, and to discuss their Gods. They met in different time zones and congratulated themselves on being clever. They even stopped crying and then quickly became miserable. There was no reason to summon laughter without sadness and so the horror of the moment managed to deaden the gestures most central to their sentient ways.
The great thaw continued.
Everyone stopped touching.
The people hardened and held their breath, waiting for a medicine to kill the tundra creatures.
Years passed.
Those who survived raised a generation of star smellers and water watchers.
Finally one day, a very lonely child noticed another great awakening in the ground.
Quietly at first, and then with fury, a brood of red-eyed, black-footed creepers burrowed out of the dark, shedding their skin and singing the most beautiful high frequency chant. The sound seemed to come from their chafing wings. A march of a thousand converging notes. The small boy picked one up and squashed it between his fingers. He smiled at the wonderful juices that came trickling down his wrist. Over his shoulder, a curious mother watched her son’s fascination. As he pulled his sticky fingers apart, his eyes lost their haze and the wobble in his little chest began to clear. The elixir of goo brightened his face and the mother nodded. “We’ll eat them”, she said out loud. We’ll crush their singing wings and drain their guts into the flour. We’ll kill the ancients with the bodies of these tiny flies.
And so the people began to plan for an ending to their contagion. A bread recipe was created and translated into 700 thousand languages. Even the ones that were stolen. The smell of bug-dough filled the streets. First the cooking happened inside the imaginary borders, but eventually it arrived everywhere. The people lined up. They were sure they would be alright and that with one small bite, the creatures would return to the tundra and fall asleep. ... . . . . .
But the problem was that no one had tested the bread on the dolphins, apes and other smart beings. No one knew how it worked. No one understood that every singing wing particle would sizzle and pulse in the blood — deteriorating memory glands and shrivelling the enunciation arteries. The insectile loaf evicted the talking nurseries. The story cells coagulated and spewed out of the humans in a high pitched song, not unlike the one familiar to the red-eyed flies. The broken words sputtered and swirled in the night air; leaving the histories behind. Far away from human lips, they ran like shapeshifters searching for a new host. They hovered, testing the light, then darted through the clouds. They bumped into one another, but disembodied stories are weightless, so the impact was not felt. The stories travelled away from the humans. Some found refuge in the cosmos. Others liquified. The longest stories unravelled and flew to the forests and cocooned in the trees for a thousand years, waiting for their rebirth.
With fury at first, and then quietly, the people searched for their stories, but they were gone out of the hearts and minds of everyone. Without words, there was very little reason for people to spend time together. Belonging faded and most lost their connections. Without stories of atrocity, identities dwindled and without identities, all of our intentions fell asleep and oozed out of our minds. There was no past or future. Our people couldn’t harken back or imagine new possibilities. There was nothing, until one day a story fell out of her cocoon and dropped to the mossy floor. She stood up with careful energy and began to move her body in a way that was familiar to the host that once owned her. Her motion changed the air and knocked other stories out of their chrysalis chamber. They all began to dance and soon limbs and lakes were alive with misunderstanding.
By KATE HILLIARD
In anticipation of sharing Story Creatures in many places, we have translated the fable that is a central part of the sound landscape for this work.
Our first sharing of the installation is in Orillia, Ontario, which is the traditional territory of the Three Fires Confederacy. I contacted Language Keeper Ernie Sandy and Language Learner Vicki Snache to ask for their permission and collaboration on an Anisinnabemowin translation. After meeting to discuss this process, we have decided not to translate the fable because it would mean rewriting Story Creatures through an Indigenous Worldview. I am holding a space for the absence of Anisinnabemowin as we perform, and I am deeply grateful to Ernie and Vicki for their time and desire to work through this conversation.
English recitations have been performed by Alison Frost, Anne Hilliard, Flavia
Bertorello, Ira Hoffecker, Kate Hilliard, Rita Deverell, Rory Samuel, Stella Samuel, Tara Samuel, Thea Verkuyl, Yi-Chen Tsai
Translated recitations have been made by artists; Marie Claire Forté (French), Flavia
Bertorello (Spanish), and Ira Hoffeker (German).
STORY CREATURES 2023 [FIBRE LAYOUT]
Total FIBRE Approximately 325'-0"
LAYER 1 LAYER 2
Line #1 -35'-5"
Line #2 - 35'-5"
Line #3 - 35'-5"
Line #4 - 37'-10"
Line #5 - 36'-0"
Line #6 - 36'-2"
Line #7 - 38'-0"
Line #8 - 35'-0"
Line #9 - 35'-3"
Line #10 35- 5"
A1 16-FEB-23 ROUGH LAYOUT
REV # REVIS ON DATE
STORY CREATURES
CHOREOGRAPHER: KATE HILLIARD
SOUND DESIGNER: SEAN REES
LIGHTING DESIGNER: CHRIS MALKOWSKI
PROJECTION DESIGNER: JEREMY MIMNAGH
SCALE:
DRAWING 1/4"=1'-0"
DATE: 16-FEB-23
DRAWN BY: C MALKOWSKI
LETTER
