“Lenora Champagne's poetry burrows under the skin in a way that is elegant and painful in this comic sigh.” — Village Voice

TRACES/fades, an intergenerational performance work with text, music by Daniel Levy, projected images by Lauren Petty and Shaun Irons, and set and costumes by Liz Prince. This movement theatre work is a meditation on Alzheimer's and our national inability to remember history. The performance space will evoke the day room of an assisted living facility. Action and images shift as the minds of the characters, who have Alzheimer’s, flicker from present-day circumstances to past experiences, including national crises that affected their lives. Alzheimer’s becomes a metaphor for Americans’ short-term historical memory loss: our national tendency to forget history and accept dubious explanations from those in authority.

This project is informed by our experiences with aging family and friends, and our sense that the forgetting of personal histories parallels Americans’ seeming inability to remember/learn from the past (particularly where war and authority are concerned).  We’re interested in the intergenerational implications of Alzheimer’s, and acknowledge the harsh realities of elders’ loss of independence in institutional settings while also exploring the struggles and conflicts of middle-aged caregivers and the child placed in the parental role.  Historical associations are dropped into the text in a manner that asks the audience to make connections to the past and notice what they’ve forgotten themselves.

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http://www.lenorachampagne.com/ 

For TRACES/fades, a movement theatre work with script and direction by Lenora Champagne, music by Daniel Levy, set and costumes by Liz Prince, and projections by Lauren Petty and Shaun Irons, the performance space will evoke the day room of an assisted living facility. (Four of the 7 performers are senior citizens.) Action and images shift as the minds of the characters, who have Alzheimer’s, flicker from present-day circumstances to past experiences, including national crises that affected their lives. Alzheimer’s becomes a metaphor for Americans’ short-term historical memory loss: our national tendency to forget history and accept dubious explanations from those in authority.

In 2006, Lenora Champagne received support from the NYSCA Individual Artists Program for Traces/fades, as well as a residency at Yaddo Artists’ Colony to work on the project. She received a NYFA fellowship in performance art in 2003 and a NYFA fellowship in playwriting in 1998.  She and composer Daniel Levy received the 1999 Richard Rodgers Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for The Singing: A Cyberspace Opera.  She was awarded three fellowships from the NEA (in directing, solo performance and an artist’s residency in Canada),  support from NYSCA, and has been in residence at the MacDowell Colony numerous times.  Her work was commissioned by Dance Theatre Workshop, Creative Time, Seven Stages (Atlanta) and In Parenthesis.  Her plays and performance works have been produced and presented in New York City, around the U.S., and in Europe and Australia. Her performance writing has been published by Smith and Kraus and in Performing Arts Journal, Women and Performance Journal, Performance Research , Chain, The Iowa Review and in Out From Under: Texts by Women Performance Artists, among other publications.  She is an alumna of New Dramatists, a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect, and a former Public Imaginations affiliated artist at Dance Theatre Workshop.  Champagne, who has a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from NYU, is Associate Professor of Drama Studies at Purchase College, SUNY.