Sing … Singe: fire, hair, scars

By Joan Schuman / January 16, 2015 / Uncategorized / No Comments

Focus the ears around the verb, “to singe.” It is never uttered as such. It echoes and whispers, forming new relationships, on and off the page.

 

HELEN WHITE

box14The artist’s poetry trembles off the page and slides into the ear. When invited to ponder sing + singe, an old dream image from a couple of winters ago, that had been stuck in her mind, simmered forth. The simplicity of the image reminds us that a dream can be fleeting and also weighty as concrete to remember across the years. [2014]

 

JUSTIN GROTELUESCHEN

These lines came across the rails, oceans, landscape of space and time, with a whisper of heat and frozen tears … from the organizer of sound artistry in various cities.

I hear a woman muttering these words, walking barefoot on snow through a pine forest at dusk, moving purposefully down a poorly marked path towards … something, but nothing that we are privy to. Her brow is furrowed and she has frozen tears on her cheeks, but her eyes are dark, almost hollow. [2014]

 

JOAN SCHUMAN

15_cicatrixVoices sing and morph; the body and branches, perhaps the trunk, burn in the aftermath of a bomb’s explosion. Cicatrix [2008] resonates in regenerative acts, resiliency, rootedness, and irreparably damaged nerves as it tries to imagine one woman’s language of war amidst a jumble of voices.

Produced for the Third Coast Festival ShortDocs Challenge: Radio Ephemera.

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