Madonna
of the Bleach was inspired by the following email from
my brother Mike:
4/21/01
Glad you could experience the wonder and magic of bleach.
My grandmother used to clean the bathroom and kitchen
tiles (pale yellow) and grout (floor, countertops, walls)
with a toothbrush and bleach ALL THE TIME. That’s
all she did besides cook. We had a very very very clean
house…that’s where I get it. Even my dad is
a huge advocate of the dark green scratchy nylon pad and
pure bleach for sanding out stains. I recommend gloves
if you do it a lot. I feel your joy.
The assignment from De Frantz at one of our earliest meetings
was to find a text that I could generate material from.
I had been generating material from anecdotes and images,
and this was my first attempt to find a physical score
from a text. I had been working with imagined responses
from these characters in the first person, which I would
call “confessions”. The response to the bleach
“email” became the spoken text of Giovanna’s
confession #3.
The
physical score evolved in two parts. The first part, which
consists of movements on the chair using shoes was created
using the following images: “magic and wonder of
bleach”/hocus pocus/thumbnails/dry hands/witch knows
secret/ STREGA.
At this point, I was saying the text of the email over
these movements, and I had selected a rather jaunty piece
of music to accompany it. Then the score shifted to the
confession, and I was looking for a way for the score
to ‘quiet down” so the text would have prominence.
I assumed a very difficult position on the chair, parallel
to the floor-supported by my legs and lower back- and
delivered the text from here. Two years later, I was unable
to support this position for any length of time and had
to modify the score. Eventually, the email text was replaced
by Bach.
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