So This is What Happened to Me
understanding sexual abuse and the elasticity of memory after trauma
with help from Ellen Reid's Pulitzer Prize winning opera: p r i s m
Bibe and Lumee
"Locked away in a sterile room, a sickly child Bibi and her doting mother Lumee are each other’s sole protectors from the unknown. When a mysterious illness lurking outside their door leaves Bibi unable to walk, her youthful curiosity begins to simmer and a seductive external existence can no longer be ignored. p r i s m, by Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins, is a haunting, kaleidoscopic new work of opera-theatre that traverses the elasticity of memory after trauma. Composer Ellen Reid’s music erupts with color, using choral and orchestral manipulation to deliver an eerily distinct sonic world.'
-- from the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater website
-- from the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater website
It's personal
"I wanted the work to be personal. And I wanted the work to expand, to give a point of view from someone who had been through an experience like that – what it opens up in your mind. So in no way did I want to be alienating. I wanted to bring the listener and the viewer into it and feel it, and through the whole piece there is a lightness and a darkness, and how those things balance together and how it opens up....There's something about the piece that makes people who haven't experienced sexual assault understand just a little bit more what it might be like....In the third act, you know what's real and you have to confront it, which feels very much like what I think the process of being a survivor feels like...When I think about any challenging moment or challenging memory, I almost feel like there's a force field of static around it, almost like you can't get close to that thing because you have to pass through this painful blade of static. What I tried to do was set up these static kind of shifts that the character had to pass through to see what had happened to her....I hope this piece allows anyone to be one step closer to living a life that isn't their own. I feel like music has a way of allowing you to understand an experience that isn't yours."
-- Ellen Reid, composer of P R I S M, excerpts from interview with NPR"s Tom Huizenga
-- Ellen Reid, composer of P R I S M, excerpts from interview with NPR"s Tom Huizenga
The story of p r i s mBlue Excerpt
Lumee (Bibi's Mother) excerpt |
process and p r i s m
Our aim in this website is to help bring about communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, humane to animals, good for the earth, friendly to people of all ages, and spiritually satisfying, with no one left behind. Such communities are, for us, inclusively compassionate communities. They are the building blocks of what we call "ecological civilizations." We use the word "ecology" to name interconnectedness, not environmentalism, although our image of interconnectedness well includes the more-than-human world. There is a spiritual dimension of ecological civilizations, and we find the spritual alphabet of Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat helpful in understanding its range. They include 37 qualities of heart and mind -- 37 forms of relatedness -- in their alphabet.
Five of them are compassion, imagination, shadow, transformation, and faith. Compassion lies in feeling the feelings of others or, if this is not possible, imagining the world from their point of view. Compassion can also include feeling our own feelings, past and present. Imagination includes the 'imagining' just noted, placing yourself in a position of another so that, in the words of Ellen Reid, we can be "just a step closer" to someone's life that is not our own. And it can also include imagining our own past, as is so evident in Reid's opera. Shadow refers, among other things, to owning the darker sides of life, personal and social, without hiding from them. These dark sides include our own suffering and the suffering of others, including the suffering that comes from violence and abuse. Owning the shadow does not mean luxuriating in it or saying that the suffering was "meant to be." But it means being painfully honest about it and to it, so that it can be integrated into your life. Transformation refers to the kind of positive change, creative transformation, that can come through owning the shadow. And faith refers to a sense that such transformation is possible, if the shadow is owned. Those of us in the open and relational (process) community see Ellen Reid's p r i s m as a opera in service to, and evocative of, these qualities of heart and mind and many others as well. Additionally, we believe that the universe is itself sound-like in that is consists of momentary events -- occasions of experience, we call them -- which means that sound itself has a special revelatory power. These occasions include joyful experiences, to be sure, but also traumatic experiences. It is not surprising then, that opera itself, and many other forms of music, can have a special power to help us enter into the wisdom conducive to ecological civilizations. They can show us what it feels like to feel trauma, and also inspire in us the hope, however dim, that something truly better is possible: a form of community beyond sexual abuse and violence. An ecological civilization consisting of inclusively compassionate communities where life can be enjoyed, and sung, wihout fear.
Our aim in this website is to help bring about communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, humane to animals, good for the earth, friendly to people of all ages, and spiritually satisfying, with no one left behind. Such communities are, for us, inclusively compassionate communities. They are the building blocks of what we call "ecological civilizations." We use the word "ecology" to name interconnectedness, not environmentalism, although our image of interconnectedness well includes the more-than-human world. There is a spiritual dimension of ecological civilizations, and we find the spritual alphabet of Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat helpful in understanding its range. They include 37 qualities of heart and mind -- 37 forms of relatedness -- in their alphabet.
Five of them are compassion, imagination, shadow, transformation, and faith. Compassion lies in feeling the feelings of others or, if this is not possible, imagining the world from their point of view. Compassion can also include feeling our own feelings, past and present. Imagination includes the 'imagining' just noted, placing yourself in a position of another so that, in the words of Ellen Reid, we can be "just a step closer" to someone's life that is not our own. And it can also include imagining our own past, as is so evident in Reid's opera. Shadow refers, among other things, to owning the darker sides of life, personal and social, without hiding from them. These dark sides include our own suffering and the suffering of others, including the suffering that comes from violence and abuse. Owning the shadow does not mean luxuriating in it or saying that the suffering was "meant to be." But it means being painfully honest about it and to it, so that it can be integrated into your life. Transformation refers to the kind of positive change, creative transformation, that can come through owning the shadow. And faith refers to a sense that such transformation is possible, if the shadow is owned. Those of us in the open and relational (process) community see Ellen Reid's p r i s m as a opera in service to, and evocative of, these qualities of heart and mind and many others as well. Additionally, we believe that the universe is itself sound-like in that is consists of momentary events -- occasions of experience, we call them -- which means that sound itself has a special revelatory power. These occasions include joyful experiences, to be sure, but also traumatic experiences. It is not surprising then, that opera itself, and many other forms of music, can have a special power to help us enter into the wisdom conducive to ecological civilizations. They can show us what it feels like to feel trauma, and also inspire in us the hope, however dim, that something truly better is possible: a form of community beyond sexual abuse and violence. An ecological civilization consisting of inclusively compassionate communities where life can be enjoyed, and sung, wihout fear.