Student Lindsay Anderson reacts to Yedda Morrison’s BathHouse reading:
The Fire of Yedda Morrison
Yedda Morrison’s performance at the Student Center Auditorium was the experience of being seduced into her reality. Her world, narrated with a quite, dreamlike urgency and lit by a single, tentative lantern light, sucked in its audience with a dangerous confidence.
Morrison, despite being faced with the obligatory technical difficulties from the start of her performance, managed to embody and reflect a unique poise and urgency that made her words that much more compelling. I found myself constantly on the edge of my seat as she delivered sounds and phrases that kept me both physically and intellectually spellbound: “moving hairs of the drowned…no one can tell you what a girl is, maybe a body with breath…like a blind child who knows his mother’s neck…”
One of the most prevalent themes throughout Morrison’s performance was the subtle violence hidden underneath the normalcy of the familiar in our world. Both socially and politically alive, it felt as though at any moment Morrison’s words would appear as physical manifestations: the girl scouts, the Heart of Darkness, the plastic greenness of the artificial plants – her passion concerning these subjects was inescapable.
Through her images, Morrison conveyed – among other things – a sense of the popular visual archive, false history, and absence. She masterfully illustrated through her slideshow the significance of the space between the visual and the written word, yet also the significance of how and where these intersect.
Yedda Morrison’s performance was a collaboration of the visual, the sonic and the written word, all of which came together in an amazingly cohesive experience. Though she gave authorship credit for the following poem to Tiffany, age 8, the words seem to describe Morrison and her work remarkably well: I am burning like fire / I am burning right now. Both Morrison and her work exude a kind of creative fire. This fire, I can attest from my own experience, is, in the very best way, dangerously contagious, something that any artist desperately hopes to be the result of such work, and such performances.