EMILY DICKINSON & I

HOW AND WHY IT WAS WRITTEN

‘There she is.’

Thus opens the play, Emily Dickinson & I, the journey of a portrayal.

When Edie first approached me with her idea of a one-woman play regarding Emily Dickinson, ‘using only her words’, it seemed like a good idea. I came to understand, rather quickly, the difficulty of such an approach. Someone else might have the genius to do it successfully, but it certainly lies beyond my (our) reach. What quickly came into focus, though, was Edie’s passion for Emily.

And there it was. It was Edie’s ‘love affair with this woman’ that inspired me. It was Edie’s struggle to write a play about her idol that was worth pursuing. I suddenly realised I was not interested in Edie ‘becoming’ Emily Dickinson, nor did I want to put Emily Dickinson on the stage.

Edie, however, was having none of this. When she realised I was suggesting that her story be told along side Emily’s, the answer was a flat out, ‘No!’

We never come to an artist’s work without our own historical, social, and psychological baggage in hand. The more I thought about Edie and her relationship with Emily as a subject for a play, the more I became curious about what it is that draws a person to a particular author’s works, that relationship between writer and reader, between the artist and the viewer. And if one isdrawn (or repelled) by an artist’s work, what does that say aboutthe viewer? Edie and I thus became engaged in a process of mixing the biographical with the autobiographical, the relationship between the poet and the reader who are of different times, different countries, different disciplines.

While I was a student at the Naropa Institute (now University) in Boulder, Colorado, one of our tasks as performance artists was to create a ‘personal journey piece’. We were steeped in the practice of sitting (both as a meditation practice and as an artistic metaphor) with what was arising in the moment and trusting the constant arrival of ‘now’ to be the palette from which to paint. Those teachers at Naropa encouraged us to continually listen to the thing that was being created, without agenda, because ‘it’, as its own entity, would inform the artist what the next step might be, but only if the artist was truly listening and able to respond. So, in our artistic practice, we were also learning how to be ‘response-able’ human beings. We would begin making work by asking, ‘What has brought me to this moment in time?’ I have carried that with me ever since.

It is through this process that the script of Emily Dickinson & I came to be, by trusting what was unfolding through improvisation as we traveled into the present unknown; by asking what brought Edie to this moment in time with her subject. What emerged was a play about the play that never happened, a meditation on writing, acting, and getting into Emily Dickinson’s dress.

Jack Lynch
January, 2005

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