Reflection on "Mary's Near Death Experience" solo theatre by Jamie Tea

Photo: Performer Jamie Tea. Photo by: Tim Nguyen/Citrus Photography.

Jamie Tea Tognazzini's solo show, "Mary's Near Death Experience" at soulOcentric had me laughing from start to finish. The performance was hilariously charming and impacted me on so many levels. Firstly, the show had many references to concern and love for the ocean, which from my previous post "Reflection on 'Save the Humans' lecture by Rob Stewart" one can see is an extremely pertinent and worthwhile issue to raise in all forms and contexts in the public eye.

Jamie Tea enlightened that perspective through a great bravura of comic timing and voice acting which grabbed the audience on a journey into the space age, complete with the naivety of a southern-belle with a knack for religious experiences and a jaded Coney Island street worker. The shapeshifting ventures were spurred on by the dream of a "cosmic wonder-fish" which led Mary to the Moon, to admire spacescapes and woo the audience's imagination with a subtly refreshing candour.

I've known Jamie Tea from her work with Green Fools Theatre, during their Outer Space-themed 2011 Halloween Howl show. It seemed almost as if Miss Tea had projected her character from that previous show and placed her unique acting genius front and centre.

Stay tuned for Green Fools Theatre this Halloween!

_________

Oh! I know that recurrent clarity, the open water: the blue ocean when calm. They say a oceanographic project recently cleared a magnificent coral shallow, with its cerulean majesty, awakening the surface of conscious freedom from the lowest of depths, the inertial core, to the highest of realms above in the unspoken silent space of brilliant sky. 

Mediterranean by Nikolay Dubovskoy Sredizemnoye

Unafraid, I swim. Sharks are a passing memory, and fish and dolphin happily glide atop the water with a bounteous air, showing their fins with the gentility of a human smile. The water is cool, refreshing, and I swim eagerly, immersed in its healing, maternal body. 

_________

Our modern lives run clean through this cursed river

Our blood dirties, streaming from the porous core
These are wounded oceans.
We sink, while the light of the world floats amiably to the surface
Belly up.

- excerpt from "Belly Up"

Achuar Victory! A Dream Come True Is An Awakening

"We have fought long and hard against Talisman. Now we've achieved this, but it doesn't end here. We have to remain awake." Achuar (FENAP) President Peas Peas Ayui

See the Amazon Watch report 

Proof: international networks of civil society and allied global citizenry make unprecedented change in the policies of big business and government. 

See my past posts on the Achuar struggle (Here & Here & Here), and we must remain aligned!

__________

An acquaintance, a young African-Canadian woman, confident and jovial, meets with me on literary terms, to edit a short story of mine. The story is in its very beginning stages of development, only a few phrases and scattered ideas. She is diligent, and always supportive. As I begin to tell her the story, I penetrate the image-letters and enter into the mystery of its narrative continuity, to explore experientially.

The concrete walls, unfinished, breathe with shadow. A well-known author sits in a dim corner, incommunicative. He is deep in listening, with headphones on to gather the soundscape of the strange, even horrifying darkness surrounding. Then, I notice his subject, a grumbling bunch of ruffians thirsting in the mud of Mexican pain. They secrete primal sounds from unlit depths below, before trailing off into the endless night. In that moment, the famed author saunters off with recording equipment in hand, leaving me to the bare depths, an empty memory.

I bleed on through the folds, with pain-stricken mind, searching through memory, confronted with a hollow mixture of painted nostalgias. A university campus, brimming with beer gush fads and costumed throwbacks to the glorious sexual revolution of their parents, now filling their pockets with the fool’s gold of American savagery. As I wander through the woods, the clouds gather above, warning of a rainstorm.

On the forest path, exiting from the campus, a friend and I are spotted by a group of peaceful youth, with meditative eyes and friendly sight. One remarks on my shirt, a gift from Israel. Soon, I find he is from Israel. He asks me, “Why is it that Americans never emerge from the forest?” I understand his referring to the colonial history. I empathize with his heart, worn from the break of political waves crashing in mid-sea. The Mediterranean harbors of our once shared ancestral home are now given speed to the sacrificial meaning of e-state.

We clamber on, my friend, an Aboriginal man, and I, as he critically rethinks the statement by the Israeli, “Haifa is a place not unlike Halifax? A seaport, where you fly from America without heed to the other?” We walk on into the city, through art galleries, attendants offer free espressos and truffles, through the museums of old travesty, and in an off-white room, sightless without a spot of focal interest, we separate.

__________

your eyes crack open
with subtle wanting
in the cold

drop

mourning

...

with the unforgiving pull,
a soft whirr from the sky's clear vacuum
exhaling
the rusty kisses of lips gone stale
with a life
lived too long

- excerpt from "Morning Dew"

Peruvian Hallucinations before the Muted North African Migrant’s Story

People and Landscape of Michoacan by Alfredo Zalce

Early Dream

I walk by a dim street in Latin America, seems very much like a bus stop sidewalk eatery in Mexico or a humble restaurant in the outskirts of a Peruvian city. Immediately outside the restaurant, a man is holding a relatively sophisticated looking, tall type jar. The jar reads something about Ayahuasca. I pass by the first time, however the second time, I drop a few coins in and receive a small bit of the Ayahuasca mix that this man is selling. I sit down in the restaurant, I feel as if I am with loved ones, good friends or my wife. We sit and I start to feel a bit woozy. Suddenly, I see a classical/jazz ensemble performing their music in a relatively nice hall setting immediately before me. I am making a mental commentary on the music. The effects seem to have subsided, as expected, I tell myself I am proved correctly that the Ayahuasca that was sold had no real effect.

Late Dream

I am at a seaside café on the Mediterranean. In some ways it reminds me of a small restaurant in Malibu, California that I went to with my brother. I sit down with an unidentified young woman and a man who resembles my old friend and colleague in Egypt, a Sudanese man. He also resembles an interviewee in Sudan who was asked about his return experiences to Sudan as a returning migrant from Egypt. The man begins speaking with me in Arabic about his father, his homeland, and a story regarding his village. The story is very interesting and has many features of local history and identity related to the man and his originating village. He is telling a story about fishing. I ask him to confirm with me that he is from Algeria, he nods. Just as I begin to translate the story for the other individual present, she begins talking over both of us to proclaim her ideas about racial barriers. The man seems disinterested, and I am somewhat bereft, though only wish to convey the man’s story and practice my translation efforts in relaying a beautiful, genuine story of home in the midst of migration and conflict.

Monday Oct, 3 2011