Ella Veres ArtVentures

Author's Note:

What is this play about? It looks like a morality play with dance, opera singing, and a tinge of clowning. It is a letter. It is a declaration. A demonstration. A protestation. A conversation, a love song to the world, a something or other.

Its first impulses came from Remedios Varo’s paintings and life as a war refugee in Mexico. Then others came from Al Gore’s global warming documentary and the deteriorating reality of New York City, all of which made me poignantly aware that we are in the mesh of little and immense interactions. In order to operate global changes you have to change yourself, clean your own little corner. I wondered about my estranged communication with Transylvania, the place I come from, with my dreaded past life under communism. I wondered what was expected of me, what was the damage I myself perpetuated by not dealing with my past.

I wondered if I should go back home again.

As I learned more about the present situation in my old country, I heard a multitude of new quarrelsome voices that were learning for the first time how to talk, after a life without freedom of speech, on issues that had affected me and caused me to run away here to avoid their grip.

But now I’ve seen the past dead and was reassured that it’s safe to go visit the old home to give these voices a more prominent platform thru this play and these fearless actors.

I give thanks to Nick Sava, Klaus Baesu, The Voice in Jena, and Daniel for allowing us to incorporate their words/experiences in this dramatic collage.

Gift to you from me, Transylvania. World.

Ella Veres

August 8, 2007