The Quiet Way

Last night I was privileged to see an excerpt of Casey Llewellyn's The Quiet Way performed at Dixon Place as part of its Puppet Blok! series.

The Quiet Way is an abstract poetical musing on art, gender, and the meaning of it all, beautifully and touchingly rendered with paper cutout shadow puppets projected behind Llewellyn. It also included an actor in addition to Llewellyn moving against the light to create evocative shadows while delivering monologues about gender and being. The words of The Quiet Way were beautiful, and I would love to see a copy of the text.

Also, the audience was an active participant in the piece. Words were projected against the wall that were our lines, and we all became implicated in the existentialist project.

It is a great piece and I look forward to seeing it when it's completed.

By the way, the facebook description reads:

"The Quiet Way is a landscape to be entered. The piece unfolds in a constant present, as figures such as Girl who Reads, Robert Llewellyn who is a Girl (by others’ designation), Lapdog and Dust endeavor to find freedom within the confines of language. The play uses Eileen Myles’ words, “I just knew in a quiet way I was ruined if I agreed to be female,” as a jumping off point for the interrogation of gender, sexuality, transformat...ion and the scraping of the self against the outside. The piece draws on a wide breadth of performance language—including puppetry, dance, poetry and live music—to call attention to the moment of speaking and the problem of self-expression. The Quiet Way asks, what do you agree to? Where do you want to go?"