Transcendence: An Elegy to Transgenerational Systematic Adaptation

When major tragedy occurs, it tends to strike grief in the minds and hearts of people throughout the world. When we engage in conversation about our individual vulnerabilities, we discover a realistic, but often beautiful mundaneness to life that is often lost. Channeling the mundane into art and community helps us to better understand the nuances of humanity. This gives the opportunity for us to connect through storytelling— using narrative as an outlet to express our feelings of grief, hope, and sacrifice. This project is a devised performance piece that explores how tragedy affects community, how people respond to major tragic events intergenerationally, and how society adapts to that response. Using the events of September 11, 2001 as a storytelling foundation, the piece stages stories—collected through interviews—and is interspersed with personal narrative, unscripted discussion, and music to build on the relationship between community and tragedy from a transgenerational perspective. This project looks through a transgenerational lens to discover the effects of collective trauma on society. The members of the ensemble investigate identity through individual and broadened perspectives to create a holistic view of what it means to be a human affected by tragedy