Scheherazade in Sydney

This project came to its culmination in a symposium at the Performance Space in Sydney recently, and was the subject of a review on Arts Hub by Talya Rubin:

'The impetus for the work came out of the sudden death of Barbara Campbell’s husband. The opening screen of her website reads: “In a faraway land a gentle man dies. His bride is bereft. She travels across continents looking for a reason to keep living. Every night at sunset she is greeted by a stranger who gives her a story to heal her heart and continue with her journey. She does so for 1001 nights.” As a way of coping with grief, Campbell undertook a period of enforced public mourning and used as her tools the daily paper, focusing on stories about the conflict in the Middle East.'

Rubin's review is available to Arts Hub subscribers here. Campbell is a member of the  Electronic Literature Organisation, and the text archive of the stories, which are otherwise only available at the time of performance online, is here. At GrandTextAuto she was taken to task for her rather severe approach to presentation, but nonetheless the frame concept and performance aspect of the project, as well as its duration over nearly three years, is remarkable.

Comments

[fifi]

I wish I could have seen this. How wonderful, but sad.
Isn't arts hub great?
Thank you for the links and for bringing this to my attention.

I meant to respond to your comment re author dedications. It's not just authors, both Thorpy and BAM have rejected my childrens requests for an autogarph with their name.

I am hoping you know who Bam is so I don't feel such a feral.

[genevieve]

Acch, I thought I'd done something funny to Scheherazade when the email notifying your comment came in. Have fixed the typo - note to self, don't have typos in headings in future, everyone sees them.

Fifi, you need not feel feral regarding BAM - the name rings a bell, and I have at least three ways of finding out these things, aged 25, 21 and 19. I wonder if Tony Hawke ((e) or not? dunno?) ever refused to write a dedication though. We have some nice skater shoes here autographed by Frenzal Rhomb. They kind of belong to me now, which is rather funny.