Recent Performance:

Forgotten Bloom
Next Stage Arts*
15 Kimball Hill Rd, Putney, VT
www.nextstagearts.org
Saturday, January 13, 2024
2pm-7pm
(Audience members may arrive and depart anytime throughout the 5-hour performance.)
$15-$20 suggested donation (cash at the door)

Performance with:
Sarah H. Paulson
Travis Laplante (saxophone)
Nate Wooley (trumpet)
Katherine West (inks/pigment)

In Forgotten Bloom, renowned improvisers Nate Wooley (trumpet) and Travis Laplante (saxophone) play for five hours together, with the intention of both creating and entering a space never before traversed. Meanwhile, Sarah H. Paulson both impacts and is influenced by the collective sound, as she engages in a performative drawing process. Paulson will work with inks & pigments made by Katherine West. The performance will result in a new series of gestural paintings. Guests may arrive and depart at any time throughout the 5-hour piece.
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The performance is presented in conjunction with Dragon Land. The paintings will be up and available for viewing during the performance.

*(Next Stage is located diagonally across the street from the Putney General Store and a couple doors up the hill from Sword Hands Acupuncture & Qigong.)

Sarah H. Paulson

Left photo of Nate Wooley. Photo credit: Julia Dratel.
Center photo of Sarah H. Paulson.
Right photo of Travis Laplante. Photo credit: Rob Peyrebrune.
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More about Forgotten Bloom

In a recent dream I asked my acupuncture teacher about her needling—a question I would have been too shy to ask in waking life. She responded, “My needle is a rose.”

My needling changed after that dream. Such a change has yet to enter my performance work. Forgotten Bloom is a request for a series of paintings to emerge in which the art might be the fragrance, where the instrument is the flower, and where the weapon transforms into a rose.

. . .

Forgotten Bloom is a gesture, performed before an audience of roses who give themselves to the guests who take their seats.

Forgotten Bloom is many things:
It is a grave, a burial, an opening for repentance, a farewell, a first meeting, a symbol of union, a mirror, a call, a devotional facing of oneself, a failure expressed, a place to converse in a language otherwise buried.

And it is nothing:
It is where symbols once known and cherished fade away like irrelevant memory. It is where time does not exist and speech is taken by a thief in the night.

The passion where these two seemingly polar positions meet is where Forgotten Bloom takes place. The location begins as an homage and ends where an unknown blooming might surface.

Perhaps a flower language will be lent.
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