Mary Dead Souls
First Workshopped at IndyConvergence
The prince’s bed it was sae saft,The spices they were sae fine,That out if she couldna lye,While she was scarce fifteen.I bade it sink, I bade it swim,It would get nae mair o me.Ye’ll get nae mare of me.Devised in collaboration with Dancer, Choreographer, Folklorist, and Reproductive Justice worker, Dr. Paulina Geurrero
A hybrid (online/in-person) interactive performance ritual, “Mary Dead Souls” explores the ballad of Mary Hamilton through the lens of a broken, time-blind kaleidoscope: through which we can glance at a fractured history of abortifacients, gendered violence, and shifting constructions of the self. These images, the narratives they bear, and their resonances through cultural memory are conjured and repurposed to imagine liberatory futures.
How do images get into the body? How do we get them out?
Where are the lives behind those images? How do we get them out?
Can you find Mary? How do you get her out?
What happens once she’s free?
In the gaps of international law, between the notes of songs hummed while we sleep, amongst the spices in the kitchen cabinet, and inside our very bodies, Mary Hamilton is trapped.
This is the Mary Hamilton born of a ballad intentionally fractured through time. It is the story of a young girl: sent to the King’s court, impregnated, publicly shamed, and executed.
But that can’t be the whole story; that’s just what happened to her.
What does she want, and why does she keep returning through time; in medieval France, in a NY dance club in '77, staring at us through the cover of a Beyonce album?
Using text from the ballad’s many variants, ancient abortive methods, and experimental dance, Mary Dead Souls is an attempt to find to conjure Mary, and to see what happens once she’s set free. It’s a collective ritual trapped in a 17th-century shipping container tumbling and turning out of reach.