Notes from Performance Scholar Dr. Joni L. Jones (Iya Omi Osun Olomo) for Phoenix Fabrik:
"Entering Phoenix Fabrik is like entering a room where many spirit forces are having private long-standing conversations, and you didn’t even know you were an eavesdropper. You catch a moving shadow out of the corner of your eye only to turn and find nothing there, just the faint scent of must and rubber. The scratch of tweed that brushes your ear confirms a presence that is more interested in the other energies in the room than it is in you. If you sit alert and open you might decipher the personal language that is moving around you and uncover the fragile history resting in the bricks and floor boards.
This world is at once foreign and familiar like the fragments of memories that no longer knit together in a seamless narrative. It is a world that lives inside of a theatrical jazz aesthetic that borrows many elements from the musical world of jazz—improvisation, process over product, ensemble synthesis, solo virtuosity— and disrupts the traditional conventions of Western theatre. A jazz aesthetic uses gestural language as counterpoint to the verbal text, so that the movement may be telling its own story while the words/breath are offering another. Like multiple time signatures in jazz, this layering of non-literal movement onto the text adds density and challenges in the work, requiring everyone present—both gossamer and human—to pay attention, to feel each other deeply, to make the work live."
© 2006 Dr. Joni L. Jones (Iya Omi Osun Olomo)
