Persona

Part of the Official Selection of KRAFTA INTERNATION DOC FESTIVAL '17 , competing in Big Smoke kraftadoc.com

Persona is an audiovisual poem about performance, stageing, fiction and how they're entangled with reality

in collaboration with Circa Tsuïca and their show Opus 7  and the american female poet Alyssa Lyn Nickerson

A melody swells from the stage,
layered and unchained, brazen,
swaying, bearing a bounty of bells.

In it we see ourselves -- we dash
before it, dancing, each step our
ebb, our flow, this practiced balance --

do you see us there, can chance
gather the galaxies that well
like city rain inside our eyes?
A prize, star-sheathed mirrors:
those facets birthed within us.

Can you, too, hover
in the tension of scales
and so relish this maze
we make? And then 
will you turn the page —
Make something of this change
enveloping our lean bodies.

We will develop identities
and proceed to descend
the staircase wobbling
in dual peripheries —

we crawl down, 
falling like a fading 
dawn through dust, 
through the trust 
of rapt audience 
into the starry dusk, 
that carnival of readied
personality. I ask you:
which parts of me have you seen,
what form do I take in this memory?

A camera clicks. We are breathing
to keep from bleeding into the borders 
of one another. Do you prefer me 
this way or that? Is it all a ruse, 
a teasing tip of a stranger's hat 
in backlot hightop shifting scenes?

An obscene thought! I'll teach you
of the thousand faces I have caught,
those that whirl and spark inside
a pearl-inlaid box, and you will
see me dressed in each, 
swirling in a waltz
in this masquerade.

We are born upon the stage,
each a brief and lovely flame.