Student Stacy Lorne reacts to Yedda Morrison’s recent BathHouse reading:
On Tuesday, 01 December 2009 I attended the Yedda Morrison reading/lecture at the student auditorium in the Student Center at Eastern Michigan University. Aside from an excerpt from Girl Scout Nation, I was unfamiliar with Morrison’s work. I did not anticipate what I would see or how I would feel about it.
A screen behind Morrison displayed a photograph project where she took several shots at different angles of a post card from Yosemite National Park. Each picture was then split into fragments then the fragments were mixed up and put together to show a sort of split vision of the mountain. Morrison’s motivation for the piece was to try and show the much popularized photo of the mountain in a different way. She described the mountain as an inanimate object that has been photographed so much that it has reached a point of paralysis that has reduced the mountain to the image. She wanted to give the photo new life with her experiment and it did.
Next, Morrison described her newest project, an erasure piece of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This project was not only the physical novella, but an image accompanied it. Like the text, the image was a piece or “left over” original. The original picture showed several men camping in a forest. The forest scene was small and behind them. The image had greys, blacks, and whites. Morrison took the men and tent out of the image and added more forest. In the original there was some white used to create a fire (if I remember correctly), but in Morrison’s she expanded this white so it looked like a fog radiating off the forest floor. The image and text she created was interesting, but what captivated me was their effect together.
Morrison enlarged her version of the image on the screen behind her and had several of EMU’s faculty recite her text. They did not read in unison. One started then another began shortly after. This went on with four people and lasted roughly 10 minutes or less. Morrison said she wanted to create a “sonic landscape” with the reading. Listening to the reading made the image come to life. When Morrison erased the original text, she only left adjectives and nouns. She wanted to remove action from the text, but this reading infused action into the image. It was breathtaking. Honestly, I know no other way to describe it. The white fog came to life and I felt like I was standing in the forest.
When Morrison first took stage she placed a light that looked like a lantern on the stage and began from Girl Scout Nation. About half way through the reading she put on some veil that reminded me of something a bee keeper would wear and proceeded to sing a portion of the text. I thought this was very interesting because the melody of the some was like a children’s play song or lullaby, but some of the words in the song were about death and murder. Her performance felt very theatrical and purposeful in order to send a message about the text through her performance and how performance impacts text.