Songs of Speculation began a year ago as a ten-minute dare. A dear friend challenged me to explore new work in a short downtown performance slot and since I had just bought a looper pedal in a quest to recover my connection to my voice, I said yes.

At the time, my mind was turning over and over Suzan-Lori Parks’ essays Possession and Elements of Style. I was thanking goddess there was a well-respected American playwright who was open about her belief that her job as writer is to “hear the bones sing [and] write it down”. I was emboldened by how she talked about her plays’ structures as dramas of accumulation -- the core of which is repetition and revision: the idea that each time something is repeated it is also revised.  As Songs was becoming a work of listening to spirits and writing down what they had to sing or say; looping ideas and phrases over and over again, Parks’ dramaturgical framework, gave me the permission to know that what I was doing was OK. My theater was not only valid, but a revolutionarily necessary contradiction to the internalized sexism, racism and white dominance that taught me to question my voice and its many expressions.

Spirits who wanted to become characters talked to me, sometimes without announcing their names--maybe because they themselves don’t know how they should be called, or maybe for other reasons. I learned that I was beginning to construct histories from the shadow archive that mirrors the history of American narratives held up to the light. Once I started to see that kerchiefs and monuments were connected and swamps were fine places to contemplate the usefulness of Time, I knew I would need support to bring the work forward in the way it deserved.

I needed very smart people who knew how to care for a process that lives in the space of The Unknown.

This is how the ‘Songs of Speculation Brain and Body Trust’ was born. In individual conversations and in groups over fruit and hummus, we sat and talked about the work. We felt into the work. We visioned about the future. We shared books, tears, YouTube clips, and prayers.  We participated in a collective and non-hierarchical dramaturgy where everyone’s ideas were welcomed.

In a culture built around hierarchy and competition, I wanted to create a room that was about being together; really being together in the work and for the work.

I am so grateful to this Trust for making a deeply opening process a lot less scary. This is the kind of work I could never do alone. Thanks to my brilliant Trust, my director, Tuce’s lights, and all the ancestors and living people who’ve encouraged the birthing of this work, I am far from alone. I am surrounded by love.

- Jillian