The Elder Portal: Sending Home

The Elder Portal: Sending Home is a sound-focused video performance that seeks to build relationships between the living and the dead. The Elder Portal is intended as an ongoing series of explorations in which, through sound and ritual, we connect to deceased elders to create healing on both sides.

Sending Home is the first iteration of The Elder Portal. In Sending Home, the Elders are called to take a deceased loved one to the spirits. Based on my father’s family history, the piece explores memory, communication, and calling. The score uses typewriters, Morse code, and voices obscured by manipulation of speed, volume and tone to create the “coded talk” of family, bringing it into form. \

Characters (in order of appearance)
* Dad (in death): Represented by a stack of cloth

* Lily (clown): Clowns are transformers and go-betweens: shifting people between laughter and tears or even life and death. Lily acts as the go-between between spirits and the living, taking the body to the other side.

* Lisa (human): As a human, Lisa’s costume is more oriented towards “street clothes,” with a ceremonial chest plate made of Smith Corona typewriters to honor the elders.