Forgotten Bloom, 2024
Forgotten Bloom
January 13, 2024 / 2pm-7pm / Next Stage Arts (Putney, VT)
5-hour performance with: Sarah H. Paulson, Travis Laplante (saxophone), Nate Wooley (trumpet), Katherine West (ink)
A note before the performance:
Guests of Forgotten Bloom will most likely have to engage personally and privately within themselves to be touched by this performance. This is not a performance to try to figure out what the artist is trying to convey. Though she might answer your questions later, it is not the point of the performance.
When I witness or listen to the work of other artists in a theater, I travel. It is like some other world is opened within me, which couldn’t open if I were sitting alone at home. From my seat, I become connected to a different dimension. Sometimes I simultaneously witness a different inner performance than the one being performed before me. Though present to the outer performance, I am also somewhere else—seeing, listening, receiving—unhooked from my worldly self. It is different than daydreaming. Many friends have heard me speak of how the best performances are ones during which I fall asleep. Such sleep is active, not passive. It is a sleep that guides and takes me to a concurrent performance. I can never decide if it will happen.
I share this not as instruction or something to mimic but rather as a way to say that there is not one way to enter this performance. As a witness, one’s position can be rigorous, as well as restful. One must bring oneself personally. The only warning is: Those hoping to be entertained will likely go home in the same way they arrived.
Knowing this will help the performance and the performers.
-Sarah H. Paulson
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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, Forgotten Bloom 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.
