By Kitoko Chargois
PearlArts Studios
“All that you touch, You Change. All that you Change, Changes You. The only lasting truth is Change.”
-Octavia Butler (Parable of the Sower)
STAYCEE PEARL dance project & Soy Sos productions draw inspiration from many artists of the African Diaspora. One of our biggest inspirations by far is African-American Sci-Fi Writer Octavia Butler. In 2011, we premiered OCTAVIA at the Kelly Strayhorn Theater. This was the company’s second evening length production. OCTAVIA wove together a magical, multilayered world colored by Butler's storytelling sensibilities and an interpretation of the award winning writer’s life. It’s impossible not to be inspired by Octavia Butler! Octavia Butler refused the notion that people of color didn’t write and didn’t belong in Sci-Fi. Her brand of Afro-futurism has gone on to inspire many more writers and readers into the genre, and several decades since her first books hit the shelves, they continue to mirror our current reality. Read on for three questions with choreographer Staycee Pearl and Sound designer Herman “Soy Sos” Pearl on bringing this literary inspiration to life.
So you’ve read the book(s) and you’re inspired AF. What’s the first step in translating a literary work to dance?
Herman: With Octavia Butler’s worlds, for me it was all about conjuring the aural atmosphere. I was heavily inspired by Jimi Hendrix’s piece 1983... (A Merman I Should Turn To Be) from his brilliant 3rd studio album Electric Ladyland. That 13:40 minute masterpiece contains much of the DNA of the sound design. Hendrix was an early Afro Futurist and is perfectly aligned with Octavia’s universe. The other thing is that when we were starting to develop this piece, I had recently gotten a new laptop and started using Ableton Live. I was making use of a whole new set of tools and workflows. It was the first time I was really able to develop complex environments in the rehearsal studio and theater.
Staycee: Wow! Yes, so I remember being totally overwhelmed with material. You’ve got to first make quick choices about what will be important to portray as there is so much important and relevant stuff!
The other question that stood out in my mind was how could we have each socially-pregnant conversation through movement? We found that it was easiest to tackle the bigger ideas and most fun to play around with the less human elements such as shape shifting and alien sex. The harder stuff was supremacy, racism, and apartheid, all of which she so expertly mirrors for us in literature.
I also felt it was necessary to literally hear her voice. Herman and I scanned interviews for just the right bites to introduce each section of our piece which loosely represented a series of books and ideas presented by Octavia Butler.
Octavia Butler has such a large body of sci-fi works. Which were the main points of inspiration in OCTAVIA and why?
S: Octavia Butler sheds light on our human-ness by imagining other worldly beings who, in many ways, have it all figured out, exposing our shortcomings. The exact books we referenced included Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay’s Ark and Patternmaster of the Seed to Harvest series. Then the entire Xenogenesis trilogy, Lilith’s Brood consisting of Adulthood Rites, Dawn and IMAGO. Lilith’s Brood Seed to Harvest explores ideas around self healing, deep interpersonal relationships, magic and immortality while the Xenogenesis books examine space and time travel, alien invasion race and species relations and basic human power struggles.
H: I wrote this up during that time:
Octavia Butler (Photo by Nikolas Coukouma)
Characters are undergoing some form of transformation or transition.
Many of the books begin with the central character waking up or being born.
Many of the characters have extremely long lives or are immortal.
Many characters must gradually come to accept an inevitable fate or outcome.
Persistent themes of symbiotic and parasitic relationships between characters.
Explorations of genetics, eugenics and breeding,
Consciousness sharing, mind merging, memories and mind control.
Hybrid, multiracial, interspecies and incestuous mating and procreation.
Social collapse and disorder.
Compulsion, need and addiction.
After you created OCTAVIA, what realizations did you come to either about Octavia Butler, yourselves, or this world we’re living in?
H: Well for one thing, Octavia Butler foresaw many of the situations we’re going through today. Her 1993 novel Parable of the Sower features a fanatical president elected on the slogan “Make America Great Again”. What else can I say?
S: Yeah, what he said!
STAYCEE PEARL dance project & Soy Sos is celebrating its 10th anniversary and the birthday of our cofounder/choreographer STAYCEE PEARL all of May with a month-long retrospective to honor the company’s history of innovative dance, multimedia experiences, and meaningful collaborations. In honor of our 10th anniversary, we’ll be sharing a series of blog posts dedicated to giving you an inside look at our productions through the decade
OCTAVIA CREDITS:
Staycee R. Pearl / Lead Artist
Herman B. Pearl / Sound Designer
Bob Stineck / Lighting Designer
Adil Mansoor/ Dramaturge
Dancers
Gwen Ritchie, Renee Smith, Jasmine Hearn, Shana Simmons, Laura Warnock, Jamie Murphy, Kerra Alexander, Jessica Marino
If you’re just tuning into our anniversary series, be sure to check out our Anniversary retrospective series here: