During the Covid-19 pandemic, storytelling traditions have had to continue in a decidedly more private and intimate setting than they may have before as live, in-person, performance has been impossible. This iteration, by Stray Dogs International, for the Global Women’s Performing Arts Festival in Busan, South Korea, responded to these demands and limitations by shifting performances online.

The online, telematic performance, as a cultural form, is ideal for expressing tension between the need for physical isolation and the longing for live interaction. Director Cornel Gabara suggested taking a section from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Molly Bloom’s soliloquy was ideal for engaging with this necessary turn inward, as the text was never intended to be performed but to be read and experienced privately as internal monologue. The inspiration for the piece came from the words of Judge Wolsey, written when he overturned the US ban of this masterpiece due to its supposedly “pornographic” content. He wrote the following passage in his explanation:

“Joyce has attempted it seems to me, with astonishing success to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious.”

Director Cornel Gabara wanted the visual presentation of the piece to mimic this notion of the palimpsest found in Joyce’s writing style and explore the mind’s stream of consciousness, which transcends time and place. To achieve this, the online streaming project was built by Jason Zeh, using multiple layers of prerecorded video collaged together with a live performance feed. The varying degrees of transparency and image masks gave the illusion of multiple iterations of the narrative stacked on top of one another and a folding of different, intersecting, timelines. Jakyung Seo designed lights and Daniel Thobias designed the costumes to help juxtapose the differences between Molly’s perception of reality, versus the objective reality of her surroundings. The text was interpreted by Irene Alby.