The desire to expand language as communication beyond words is my primary motivator for this performance. I used my body as an encoded text between words and silence, sound, actions and life stories. The absence of words at times and the fragmentation of structured language was evident in some actions while poetry emerged in others.

“Calling the Cuckoo” was a series of short and long actions about language as body, voice, space and movement, with a healthy dose of humor. Each performance short built into the next using chanting, song, extended vocal techniques, speech and actions from daily routines and life cycles where verbal and gestural languages intersect. Some of the processes performed included building a poem phonetically through repetitive song, reading a story backwards, bodily spelling words, telling a story with words and onomatopoeia effects and dancing with a fabric cut-out of words/sentences as a body. Some props were used such as a large red stuffed anatomical heart, three-foot drawing sticks and a body/word cut-out. The support structure of video projections and audio tracks were programmed in Isadora.