Avalon Blog Post 3: AVALON (disambiguated)

AVALON (disambiguated)

A guest post from Judith Jerome, Production Dramaturg for AVALON

Avalon. Frankie Avalon. The Avalon Ballroom. Mists of Avalon. I’m just starting to let my brain storm. But wait, the computer is in front of me: 110 businesses, songs, bands, places, films, games, novels, boats, etc. are listed in Wikipedia as containing the name Avalon.  The Wiki heading is: “Avalon (disambiguation).”

 Yes. The disambiguation revealed is the power of the name, and behind it some felt sense, some memory shrouded in mists, a dream, lingering cultural resonance, centuries old. That place. Whatever it was.

I used to teach a class I called “Red Circle Stories.” It was about identifying and performing the personal stories we tell again and again, or even if we hold them secretly, tell them only to ourselves, we have circled them in red in our own minds. Stories of mystery. Stories we know as well as we know the backs of our own hands, and yet don’t know at all. Stories that reassure us that I am I, but also that are always on the verge of disarming us/I. Stories we tell in the hope that this time we will learn something new.  

Shakespeare’s stories are like that. They are our western European cultural dreams; that’s why they have lasted for almost 500 years. None of the history plays started whole cloth with William himself. He told stories already circling in the cultural imagination. Every telling is a new telling. What will we learn about ourselves this time?

The stories of King Arthur and Camelot are the same and, crucially, Avalon is their backdrop. The stories came out of Avalon; the world once was Avalon. Maybe.

One text behind Melody’s seeking Avalon is Rianna Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade, which opens out an archaeological pre-history that tells the loss of a partnership social order, its defeat by a dominator model. Similar in some ways to the mists Marion Zimmer Bradley sought to lift in her 1983 novel. Psychoanalysis teaches us that the dissolutions/psychoses we fear are ones we have already been through; I think it must be the same with our Avalons, our Shangri Las, our Xanadus. Pre-historical truth or no, somewhere we know something about Avalon and long for it again.

Right now Melody is seeking Avalon in places. Geography, buildings, rocks, dirt, mosses, and trees. So much is held there, so much to learn, and some of us are just beginning to understand this different kind of learning . We write emails to trees and grant personhood to Lake Erie.

Maybe we will collect all the different tellings, with their many layers of cultural agenda, as Melody says it, as we go toward August’s performances. I have not looked these up on Wikipedia but I’ll bet there are way more than 110, and way more fun to come up with them ourselves.

Melody standing in ancient Cumbria's Pine Lake, wearing an 

"AVALON Volunteer Fire Co." shirt she found at a thrift store in Brooklyn.

NEXT POST in Seeking Avalon:  TINTAGEL

AVALON will have its world premiere in August 2019, produced by Opera House Arts and staged in a site specific production at Nervous Nellie’s Jams and Jellies on Deer Isle. All text and photos ©2019 Melody Bates. Learn more and support her work here.