SOLILOQUY IN ENGLISH (2016)
created by Patrick Blenkarn
with the help of a great number of people, including those interviewed and those who help with the paper- and bookmaking process.
photo: Dahlia Katz
Part reading circle and part documentary printed on a re-pulped Oxford Dictionary, Soliloquy in English is a book for multiple voices about the language that connects them. In each performance, a small group of readers join Vancouver-based artist Patrick Blenkarn in reading the book out loud, passing it from hand to hand and voice to voice. In doing so, the readers bring to life a collage of stories (interviews with the artist’s friends, family, and mentors) about what it means to share and live in the English language today—the dreams it makes possible and the marks it can leave behind. Soliloquy in English is an attempt to pull this lingua franca back upon itself, to get us talking about how we are talking.
Presentations:
2016 SummerWorks Performance Festival (Toronto)
2017 rEvolver Theatre Festival (Vancouver, presenting partner Theatre Conspiracy)
Press: Performance, Place, and Politics, MyEntertainmentWorld, NOW Magazine, Torontoist, Mooney on Theatre, Paper Slurry, Hye’s Musings, Theatre Conspiracy
“At once a political commentary on the hegemony of English as a global (and globalizing) lingua franca and an alternately funny and moving concatenation of voices remembering what it’s like to dream and swear and sing in another tongue, Soliloquy‘s spare dramaturgy also effectively implicates participants in the story being told. For we each take turns reading different passages in the book, a pattern of arrows indicating when we are to pass the book to our left or to our right. I found this simple physical act of passing an open book to a neighbour and indicating the place on the page where they are to continue reading to be one of the purest elaborations of what I understand to be the goal of relational aesthetics in art and performance.” — Peter Dickinson, Performance, Place, and Politics
