“Chosen fear.”
In a recent conversation, the extraordinary artist, athlete and poet Shana Carroll used that term. For a former Cirque du Soleil trapeze artist, it has a real resonance. One she talks about in opposition to imposed fear. She knows something about that variety of fear, as well.
For a long time, I’ve been a fan of The 7 Fingers, a Montreal-based collective that fuses circus and theater with breathtaking results. When I heard their newest piece was going to be a creation of Shana’s—one of their founders—and that she’d be mining her own life’s narrative as the source text, I was all in. Partly because Shana is every bit as gifted a poet as she is a performance maker, and because she shared—openly and without sentiment—that her life now includes a medical diagnosis that’s pretty daunting. An imposed fear. She, though, was going to use her narrative tools of bodies in motion to contend with that reality. To mine the courage she’s built by purposefully taking on risk for years—that chosen fear—in order to face the current moment.
On some level, we’re all working without a net. To sit in witness to that bravery is to gain some ourselves.
Susan V. Booth
Walter Artistic Director
