This interactive performance interweaves magical realist narrative techniques and Brechtian alienation devices with a series of destabilizing positions revolving around the construction of alterity.
The print version is in chelsea 70/71, which can be ordered, I via their email, ChelseaMag@aol.com.
"There is a story everyone knows, although we all know it under different names, and in different places. We all know the story of a child dreaming away the summer noon. Everyone who knows it remembers it differently. Everyone who hears it changes it. Each time we tell it we change it, and if we don't change it, then next time we shall have to tell it just the same.
We all know that there is a great braided chain of action and response that makes the world one web. When we pull on any link or strand, the whole fabric trembles. In Constanza in 1886 three of these strands were the Jews, the Gypsies, and the good people of Romania. Of the first two it was said that they took children, the Jews to sacrifice them at their Sabbath, and the Gypsies to geld the boys, rape the girls, and sell both to the Sultan in far away Turkey. Yet people went on dealing in an ordinary way with the Jews in their shops, although not in their part of the city. They went on bringing their pots and pitchforks to the Gypsies to mend, as if they did not really believe what had been said.
As Paula sat dreaming down at the life of the anthill, she heard a growing murmur like breaking waves. Tambourines, drums, and horses' hooves exploded onto the cobblestones. A huge mob boiled from between the houses. She saw bright, colored wagons with cloth tents over them, horses with tassels and bells braided into their manes, with little feathered hats perched between their pointed ears. On the front seats of the wagons rode old men and women, gold fringe edging their jackets, the men wearing big cloths braided around their heads, or stiff hats without brims, gold fringe where the brims should be. These must, they must be the Gypsies. Some of the people who followed on foot were Paula's neighbors and their children. Some were Romanian people from outside her part of Constanza, people she'd never seen before, people almost as strange as the Gypsies. She stared, eyes and mouth wide open.
We all know these Gypsies. We have seen photographs or films, or heard tell. We carry pictures of the Gypsies in our minds. We know that Paula saw dark, Gypsy men leading the horses, guiding the wagons, dancing around them, with wide-legged, brightly colored trousers, and gold-fringed belts. Their shining black hair hung long about their faces, loose or in braids. Their gold ear hoops flashed in the copper sunlight. Men with hoops in their ears! Paula had never before seen men like that. The gold fringe danced on their belts and on their red caps. Some wore shirts with wide, puffy sleeves gathered at the wrists, shirts open to the waist; some wore no shirts but only open, short jackets. She could see the sweat sparkle on their chests.
And the Gypsy women: we know those women. They wore full, many-tiered, flounced skirts. Their wide-necked blouses drooped lazily off their dark shoulders, halfway down their dark, shining arms. Their black eyes blazed behind heavy black outlines of kohl. Their gleaming black hair coiled about their ears or flicked, braided in long plaits, down their backs. Their gold ear hoops glittered. When they kicked out their bare feet, dancing over the stones, the soles gleamed red with paint. They spun, and their skirts belled out wide around their naked legs, and higher, where they wore nothing, so that Paula could see their secrets. As this ferment of humanity rushed past her doorstep, Paula could smell a roiling odor of sweat, of oil on gleaming bodies, of horses, of garlic, of cinnamon and musk and unknown spices, and another, exciting and half familiar smell that felt somehow comforting and home-like. She did not know its name. She had smelled it sometimes early mornings, after her father went downstairs to light the fire, when she crawled into bed and curled up in her mother's arms. She would not smell it again and know what it was until, as a young bride, she woke in the arms of her handsome husband after a night of love.
Now four tall men trotted quickly along the stones. Long poles rested on their shoulders, carrying a chair woven of willow branches. In that chair sat a woman wide as a door. Black and gold teeth dotted her mouth. She towered over the heads of the men who carried her. High on her head sat a heavy gold and silver headdress that dimpled in the pocked light. From her ears swung long, silver crescent moons. Around her neck hung a thick, silver chain with a milky stone, round, big as a fist, like an eye, a moon that saw everything.
In the wake of the massive woman with her four tall men skipped a boy no bigger than Paula, in wide, blue trousers and a red jacket with gold fringe, playing a violin and singing. Around him capered a little, black, wrinkled, hairy man just his size, dressed like his twin. Black, hairy, wrinkled hands poked out of the twin's red and gold-fringed sleeves. Black, hairy feet stuck out of his flapping, blue trousers, with fingers and thumbs just like hands. Through the back of his trousers waved his long, black, hairy tail. With one of his feet-hands he took the hat off his head and tossed it high. One of his hand-hands caught it neatly, and held it out to catch the coins people threw. This little animal twin was tied to the boy by a long, blue cord looped around their wrists, just the way Paula was tied to her grandfather when she took him walking. As the boy played his violin and sang, his voice held all the sadness of the world and the wandering road. Paula had never heard that language, but she knew it without exactly knowing."
So begins the interactive performance that shows how Paula, a little Jewish girl in Romania, followed her heart down the wandering road after this group of colorful strangers one summer day, and became Queen of the Gypsies....
Performance Copyright 1990, Judith E. Johnson
Text Copyright 1999, Judith E. Johnson
Performances upon arrangement