OFFTA 2021

I went to Lost together at the OFFTA. Seeing wasn’t really what you did at this performance. I entered a little workshop space with two craft tables equipped with boxes of paper, pipe cleaners, beads, lot’s small objects and many crafty accoutrements that would bliss out any crafty heart. There was also a shelf with beautiful and delicate little sculptures. I guessed these were what the two artists would make with me and what Lost Together was about.

The two artists asked me to sit on a comfy couch chair on one side of the room. They sat in front of me. They had a delightfully welcoming and warm farm table full of food type presence. They asked me to share an object, a story or feeling of something I had lost. Their prompt must have been broad because my lost “thing" was my childhood which I loved so much, a sadness that is linked with the anticipation of the overwhelming grief I will feel when I lose my parents (who are still alive). I described watching Stark Trek as a family when I was a kid and my dad’s excitement when the opening sequence would come on. He would call us into the living room, grab my hand and squeeze tight, staring at the shock of light, orbiting planets and the deepest dark matter with the opening lines “These are the voyagers of the Stark Trek enterprise…” reassuringly narrated by Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Total awe and I suspect a lot of hope. And for my mom, I chose to describe the potlucks that were so important to her and which are foundational to my sense of life. Those pot lucks were open to neighbors, friends and such a wide circle of people that strangers to us were often there, somehow related to someone. These potlucks are utopian to me because they were just about meeting people and eating together. Nothing fancy. A spiritual choice perhaps, but just about the basic best stuff. After a bit of thought and a lump in my throat, I shared with these two mystical art therapists, that what could represent my loss would be a Holodeck potluck sculpture.

They smiled and went off to create a little Holodeck-potluck sculpture from their craft tables.

They came back and showed a tiny little table with some fruits and of colourful bowls food on it, a checkered table cloth (not my mom’s style but not the point) on a grid patterned floor to represent the Holodeck room. They held it in the palm of their hands and then put it in mine. I marvelled. This new little work of art that came from my past.

It gave me a sharp and brilliant sensation. The performance didn’t represent the lost experiences I described, it didn’t formalize them or even recreate them. What I was given to me was something new from what I had shared of my loss. I felt this so painfully and sweetly: what is here now is the gift of what we have said goodbye to and how you can’t have one (birth, newness, presence) without the other. And I cried with gratefulness; to my parents, to Star Trek, to community potlucks and for this little performance that offered me a moment with their invaluable gifts.