Original text, music, drag, makeup/costumes, collage and video by Kim Farris-Manning. This project is a drag arborist graphic audio chapbook, released virtually on April 21 2021. Recorded at the Canadian Music Centre (Toronto) As part of PIVOT 2021, Episode 3, premiered April 22, 2021 at 7pm.
Text inspired by and based on Poem I of "Twenty-One Love Poems" from The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich, and "Queer Grace" from Where the Words End and My Body Begins by Amber Dawn.
I was first introduced to the glosa in Amber Dawn’s Where the Words End and My Body Begins, and was especially inspired by her poem “Queer Grace,” which “glosses” Poem I of “Twenty-One Love Poems” in Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language. I have in turn written a work that glosses both works (although rather flexibly compared with the original form, from early Renaissance Spain). This project began as a creative way to explore my queerer sides when I abruptly moved from a rainbow apartment on St. Catherine Street in Montreal to be with family in an Ottawa suburb during the pandemic. The move coincided with my haphazard entry into arboriculture and the art of climbing trees – and the rest grew from there. King of Chlorophyll is intended to be read, listened to, watched, looked at, flipped through, mixed up and/or absorbed by people of all sorts and ages. You can read and then listen, listen and then read, read and listen, readlistenreadlistenreadlisten.
Music performed by Continuum Contemporary Ensemble