desirée leverenz is one of the creators behind “Rebirth”, the third act of Towards Rebirth. In this blog post, she reflects on the creation process. Above photo by Elana Emer.
Towards Rebirth was born from discussion. It was born from conversations of who we want to be as
artists,
as leaders,
as community members,
as humans.
If this show was a house, we didn’t start with a blue print. We didn’t even have a picture of how we wanted the house to look. But we did have material.
Material of people: we knew there were really special artists that we wanted people in our community to meet and know.
Material of voices: We knew we wanted to hear from voices that aren’t often heard the way they want to be heard.
Material of ideas: We knew we wanted to investigate shakespeare in a way that felt relevant.
I’m now going to shift pronouns from we to I. Because I’m writing this blog post, desirée, hi everyone. I think it is irresponsible to talk about relevance from a “we” place. What is relevant, for me, is a “me” subject. So … for me, questioning how I adapt shakespeare has been one of my main artistic investigations. Should I be spending my energy here? I’m not sure. Do I keep finding myself in situations and moments where I ask so much about shakespeare, yes. For me, stories transcend time. All stories. For me, shakespeare upholds a certain white-supremacist-english-language-speaking-educated-classist rhetoric that I am not interested in participating in. So does engaging with shakespeare mean I engage with white supremacy? What if I chose to look at shakespeare for poetry and not at shakespeare as an institution? How can I create from there? Can I create from there?
Those were the questions swirling in my head before we started. Then I had the absolute privilege of working with Tiffany Martin and Stephen Jackman-Torkoff. shakespeare was in front of every conversation. In any opinion that I shared, I compared and contrasted it to shakespeare — like a very good language arts student. Throughout the process I began to let go of the shakespeare reigns and started to centre myself, my group and the audience.
What do I need?
What can I give our audience?
What can I give my group?
What do I have capacity for?
What are my ancestors asking for me to share?
So I created with my group. I built and dreamed and screamed and whispered and moved and dug and crawled and cried and glued and painted and we created our act Rebirth. We created a piece that was filled with love. A piece that had wisdom that was a thousand years old, and had ideas from the future.
Then one day Stephen said to me: “we wrote a shakespeare play.” And they were right. We wrote a shakespeare play. A story that is filled with epic-ness, and heartbreak, and poetry, and laughter, and verse, and joy and tragedy. A play that is not an adaptation, or a retelling of shakespeare— because it is shakespeare. It is a contribution to the institution that is shakespeare in the most radical way: the thirty-eighth play.
Can art ever be successful? I don’t think so. But I know that during this experience I was transformed. I was transformed by the people, the voices and the ideas— the materials that existed from the very beginning. I didn’t build a house. Maybe that’s what we think success is, finding a blueprint and building up (on land that isn’t ours)…
(Now all we need is for you to legitimize this little show, the way whiteness has legitimized all of shakespeare, and maybe we can start working on the thirty-nineth.)
But I didn’t want to build a house. Instead, I wanted to break apart the material that we had and share it with all of the beautiful people that came to witness us.
So that maybe they can take that material into their homes, and grow it, and care for it. So that maybe they can then give that material to others.
So that maybe, when we have all this material, we can imagine how we can build a home all together, instead of a million different houses. A home that spans infinity, and reaches to the stars.
“Un-thread the rude eye of rebellion
And welcome home again discarded faith.”
Reach back to your ancestors
And hear their voice in your heart.
Let the revolution of love move your feet forward
And exist in the waves of now.
Love, Solidarity, and Light,
desirée
desirée is a theatre creator, director, screamer and dreamer based in tkaronto. she imagines a future of story telling where we can all be our most beautiful selves, and we can have a lot of “woa that’s rad” moments.
Towards Rebirth: The Film premieres Oct. 14th and is available on-demand until Oct 31st. Pre-registration required. Click here for tickets.