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Happiness at Shotwell Studio
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I admire physical theatre with its action, its pushing-around of characters, fight-scenes, large gestures, exaggerated body-language and double-takes. Heather Harpham uses the physical dimension to illustrate and enlarge her very personal story in Happiness at Footloose’s Shotwell Studio. Heather Harpham develops her narrative with gestures of introspection, indications of universality, problems with another person, disconnected thinking, fractured personality, denial, the narrative of a child, optimism, frustration, helplessness, dread, deference to experts, demands of a child, living on blood transfusions, conversations with personalities in the medical community, bone-marrow transplants, and the body-connected-to-machine identity crisis. The misfortune of another is a sad event to observe, all the more so when the victim is a child and the story-teller is the mother.
Solo performance demands a cast and Heather acts the part of several characters, including her daughter, her husband, patients, nurses and doctors.
I was struck with the artwork as simple and sentimental at core and yet connected to the larger complexity of our culture, its context a framework of allusions and illusions, generalities and specific facts and myths and falsehoods, intentions and fears and desires of not only of the individual at center but the entire network of everyone involved in the giving and taking of advice and sympathy.
The experience was good training for me. I developed new skills as a viewer of theatre and now live in a larger world.
Happiness was in San Francisco for only two days but you can follow New York City-based Heather Harpham at www.heatherharpham.com.
Keep in touch with Footloose and their Artists In Motion program at www.ftloose.org.
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