The Fifth String
I became deeply involved several years ago with Andalusian pre-Expulsion culture, seeking out its history, its literary and performing traditions, coming to realize that this time of La Convivienca (living together with difficulty but productively) presses on our current moment of divisions among peoples and faiths and points to ways of bringing these together.
Artistically, I’ve been thrilled by the richness and beauty of this time, much of it only recently uncovered. I’m equally fascinated by a question that I have used as a leitmotif in the script: Answer me this: do not all things exist at the same time?
By means of interlinking stories, I have been able to make geographies and times interpenetrate, to bring together, for example, the words of Hebrew and Arab poets and thinkers with their contemporary counterparts. I also place the Andalusian time of creative ferment and expulsion in juxtaposition with our own time of diasporas and migrations; more people are on the move than has ever been seen before.
As participants in a world culture, we need to ask how we can go on, on what terms, in what relationship to the past and present, when people have to live in new places and new contexts. The Fifth String tries to find answers to these questions, not in a didactic way but in an embodied and compelling theatrical event that will, I hope, inspire audiences to cross traditional boundaries and make new connections.
The Fifth String has been presented as a reading in 2008 in Berlin, a workshop at CalArts in 2010, forthcoming in 2011 as a workshop at PACT Zollverein, Germany, and a staged reading in New York.
For more, please go to: TheFifthString.net