It all started one day while undergoing a medical procedure. I watched the bridge of the CT scanner drift in and out of my gaze and thought, wow, I could tell the story of my life through all the things I’ve seen while lying on my back! And so it began.
From memories of my childhood attic bedroom and staring at its rafters, dreaming they were trapezes from which I could swing from one to the next; to then becoming that very trapeze artist who literally swung on rafters for a living, often lying on my back on a cold stage and staring at that same trapeze from below. From my mother’s bed to my child’s bed, from seedy motel beds to sterile hospital beds, from giving birth to confronting my own mortality—those views from below were all pivotal chapters in a life story.
It’s also fair to say I arrived at a certain age, a certain life experience, and a certain medical diagnosis, where I was feeling compelled to memoir. What started as an exercise on a page soon became something bigger. Wouldn’t it be more fitting to memoir in the same form I’ve been doing everything for the last 40 years, that is to say, a circus-theater-dance-musical hybrid?
Those are indeed a lot of hyphens to juggle (even if we are in the juggling business). The “directions for use” here are slightly different from any one of those forms, so let’s just say I invite you to receive the show with your left and right brains at once. Accompanying the literal narrative is physical, visual and acrobatic language, rich with metaphor, aiming to tell a fuller story from all its visceral angles than any one of those forms could on its own.
They say everyone in your dreams is you. The dreamlike quality of memory is in play here, and while the cast morphs in and out of various roles, they are all Herself, at different moments and eras—all representing the multitude of selves that are housed simultaneously in one single slanted-walled room.
Shana Carroll
The Attic Director
