“All Artwork Is a Magical Act”: An Interview with Susan Aberth and Stacy Klein / Jennifer Johnson

Photo by David Weiland “All Artwork Is a Magical Act” performance with live music and large-scale mythic An Interview with Susan Aberth and Stacy Klein, storytelling replete with masks and pageantry, stilt by Jennifer Johnson walking and street theater, poetry and acrobatics. In the refurbished barn that serves as the ensemble’s Founded in 1982, Double Edge Theatre is a indoor theater, actors fly from the rafters, collaborative, residential theater company located suspending themselves precariously from ribbons or since 1994 on a former dairy farm in bars; at various sites around the farm, actors fly Massachusetts (on the ancestral lands of Mohican, through trees or suspend themselves high above the Nipmuc, and Pocumtuc people). Approaching the spectators. The effects are riveting: this is not farm from the village of Ashfield, where the carnival; it is magic. company and its directors live and work, one first encounters a striking feature of the theater’s training An autonomous, wholly artist-run organization, facility: a series of suspended cords, trapezes, and Double Edge was founded in Boston as a feminist nets towering above a grassy field, which serves as ensemble and a laboratory for experimental creative an apparatus with which actors—and the many process, a mission that has evolved into a year- students who visit the farm for training—can round ecosystem of collective living, farming and practice “flying.” Each year Double Edge Theatre environmental education, rigorous theatrical hosts both indoor and outdoor performances at the training, and collaborative artistic and musical farm, in addition to tours and performances, that creation. The group’s founder, Artistic Director integrate landscape and spectacle, intimate Stacy Klein, began training in Poland in 1976 with actor Rena Mirecka, founding actor of Jerzy Amanda Miller as the Pajaro (the parrot who figures Grotowsky’s Laboratory Theatre, while completing in Carrington’s 1977 novel The Stone Door), Travis a BFA in directing; she would later complete a PhD Coe as a flying Hyena (from her 1939 short story in Theater while creating the first two women’s “The Debutante”), Matthew Glassman and Adam theater festivals in the world in 1979 and 1980, in Bright as part of her oft depicted kabbalistic trio and collaboration with Susie Chancey. The name Hannah Jarrell as the Giantess (from her 1947 Double Edge extends, Klein has explained, from the painting), among others. Double Edge followed La ensemble’s first production, RITES, a Maga y el Maestro with a site-specific outdoor modernization of the Bacchae of Euripides set in a spectacle, Leonora’s World, performed at various woman’s bathroom in London; the double-edged sites around the farm; Leonora’s World premiered axe used in Bacchic sacrifices—the labrys—had in Fall 2018 and will be reprised as the company’s likewise been taken up by the feminist theologian fall spectacle this October 10-13. Mary Daly as part of the iconography of her work, and stands here for an instrument for What follows below is an interview conducted by combatting “isolation and erasure,” Jennifer Johnson, who co-created La Maga y el part of the ensemble’s core mission of art and Maestro and Leonora’s World and plays Leonora in social justice. both performances, with Stacy Klein (with whom Johnson co-created the performances) and the art One of the operating principles of Double Edge historian Susan Aberth, an expert in the work of Theatre—and a remarkably present aspect of any who serves as an artistic visit to the farm—is its fusion of vividly consultant for the project. In this conversation, experimental theater with a resounding commitment which has been adapted from the original to living culture, which (as the Theater’s mission transcription, the participants discuss Double statement describes), refers to (cultural / economic / Edge’s interest in Carrington and address the roles organizational / personal / political) work “created of magic in the living arts of the present. In and sustained within an open, honest, meaningful, particular, they address the exigency of relevant shared experience.” Carrington’s ecofeminist ideas about ritual, visionary experience, and non-normative forms of Over the past two years, Double Edge Ensemble, knowledge and thought in the face of contemporary led by Klein, along with Co-Artistic Directors and misogyny and the normalization of extremism and lead actors Jennifer Johnson, Carlos Uriona, and white supremacy. What does it mean, they ask, to Matthew Glassman, as well as Producing Director approach the life and work of Leonora Carrington Adam Bright, has developed a cycle of as a way to “prioritize imagination in times of performances related to the life and work of creative, emotional, spiritual and political polymath writer-artist Leonora Carrington (1917- uncertainty”— and thus as a figure central to the 2011), whose centenary in 2017 has led to a series very mission of Double Edge Theatre? of major exhibitions and the republication of Carrington’s writing. Double Edge’s first Upcoming touring dates for La Maga y el Carrington-related performance, Leonora & Maestro in 2020: Alejandro: La Maga y el Maestro, premiered at the Boston, MA: Arts Emerson (Technical Residency) Peak Performance series a t Montclair State February 24-28, 2020 University in March 2018, and received Albuquerque, NM: Revolutions Festival rave reviews. The performance reimagines the March 11-12, 2020 artistic and spiritual encounter in Orange, CA: Musco Arts Center City of the British-born surrealist and her March 18, 2020 mentorship of the Chilean-born filmmaker Detroit, MI: The Hinterlands’ Assemblage Alejandro Jodorowsky, drawing upon April 2-6, 2020 autobiographical accounts by Jodorowsky and, in Porsgrunn, Norway: The PIT Festival particular, animating the fantastic bestiary of June 19-20, 2020 Carrington’s fictions and images. The cast thus features Johnson and Uriona as Carrington and —Jonathan P. Eburne Jodorowsky, respectively, but also ensemble actors : :

Jennifer Johnson: To begin with, since both of you and La Chasse (1942), and Down have quite distinct perspectives—you, Susan, as a Below (1940), Kron Flower (1987), among so many scholar and a Carrington expert, and you, Stacy, as others—and the Kabbalistic and Alchemical worlds a theatre director—could you each speak to how they depict. And then I started reading her books, you came across the work of Leonora Carrington? and Stone Door was for me astonishing.

Susan Aberth: I was drawn to the work of Leonora SA: A recognition of one’s reality, seen in pictorial Carrington by complete chance. I was working on form. 57th Street in New York at the time and came upon Brewster Gallery where she was then showing. As I gazed at her work it awakened something long buried inside me, it was like speaking one’s native language after a long hiatus. I think there was a split-second decision I made while standing in front of a painting—that I would write my PhD dissertation on her. It was like a mystical experience.

Stacy Klein: I had been working for several years on a Latin American Cycle, the fifth cycle of performances at Double Edge. This included Once a Blue Moon- Cada Luna Azul, which was an outdoor Photo by Maria Baranova spectacle revolving around co-artistic director Carlos Uriona’s experience in the military JJ: I know that for both of you, your work draws dictatorship in Argentina, his birthplace, as well as a from and uses different magical traditions. In the look into the cultural traditions of South America. work of Double Edge Theatre you can really see it After success creating two touring spectacles with in the recourse to the Kabbalah and Jewish this material, we decided to do an indoor piece throughout the company’s performance exploring the Chilean dictatorship and drawing history, as for instance, Shekinah and Sheba—the from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s books, particularly Feminine archetypes we saw in Shahrazad: his memoir Where the Bird Sings Best (1992), about A Tale of Love and Magic (2013). Can you speak to his family’s migration to South America, told in a how you’ve used such imagery, as well as to how magical realist style. The failed election in the US Leonora used it I’m also interested in how happened right as we were starting to work, and I Leonora’s work invokes the Feminine Divine, and decided never again to do a performance that did how have you brought that forward as well, both not have a woman lead. Thus I searched for a Latin now and in the past? American artist (a visual artist, because I am drawn to an image-based artistry). I had never really SA: That’s a big question. worked with a woman painter before. And while I was searching I found a couple of really interesting JJ: It is; it’s large. Cut it into pieces and answer it painters from Argentina and Mexico. Then my how you want. friend told me about Leonora; she had just been to visit her son Gabi, who took her to Leonora’s SA: It’s a great question. I have had astrologers and house, and she thought I should look at her mediums tell me my mission on earth is to help paintings. I couldn’t believe that I had never seen reintroduce the Divine Feminine into the world, and her work before because it was much more familiar before they told me this I had already known it as to me than any of the work that I had done with any my mission from a very young age. I have painter, in every way. Particularly her landscapes— steadfastly gone on that path through a variety of paintings such as The House Opposite (1945), different spiritual practices. Just now I think people are coming to a greater realization about these connect to that center, that dwelling, because when traditions, but it was not always so. One phase of it we’re fragmented as women we can easily lose began in the with , with Marija ourselves or get swallowed up into the universal Gimbutas and the Great Goddess, but I was not male Christian reality, which has oppressed the always comfortable with that imagery. So for me spirituality of many women. Leonora Carrington was the most pure manifestation of that impetus but in a non- SA: I’m going to comment here because I’m very stereotypical manner, involving a lot of diversity. interested in what you just said. I grew up in an Also, what I really liked about her work from the ethnic household where my mother ruled and so I first moment I encountered it was that it wasn’t was used to female power and autonomy, and I was overt; it didn’t copy other peoples’ Goddess very free. When I went to college— which is the forms. It was her own genuine vision and ultimate site of male institutional brainwashing, I permutation of women’s place in the universe, not too was shocked. I began my career as an even particularly as a supreme being but as an equal Egyptologist specifically to look at different kind of being or even energy. I also respected her religious traditions, because I certainly wasn’t part deeply as both an artist and as a person. She of White Protestant Anglo Saxonism; that’s who connected women’s rights and animal rights, for really runs educational institutions. I turned out to instance, in ways that weren’t really being talked become an African Art Major—anything to get about, and there she was doing it in the 1950s, you away from that singular, oppressive vision that I did know, equating the two. She was a real visionary. not grow up with, I did not identify with. I think a lot of people are like that. SK: Well, I have always felt myself to be female, and that was something – at least in my upbringing- that was looked at as strong, powerful, and bold. I never realized that this was something unusual until I went to college and was suddenly surrounded by men who in many cases, assumed the power was theirs to have and hold, and this was not part of my upbringing, certainly not from my father. So that shocked me into a desire to look into things: why the world was so different than the way I felt. And then in the 1970s the book When God was a Woman came out and I was like: oh yeah, this makes sense. And so then I realized that I needed to Photo by Maria Baranova start researching Judaism, in terms what was really there. I had somehow been transported into a Male JJ: In Leonora’s work, she’s often subverting the Christian Reality. I needed to find my own images of male Christianity you’ve each described, story. Kabbalastic writings are centered around like the Trinity— or else invoking and renaming duality, God is a dual male/female being and spirit, figures such as Mary, or the Goddess. She also uses so that made sense to me. So I think I’ve been in a variety of tactics and traditions and images that that other, older—but also completely new—reality are Kabbalistic or Celtic or associated with Tibetan since then, in a variety of ways. It can be mystical Buddhism. but also an everyday ritual practice. And lately I find its tied to a daily courage that one must evoke SA: It is a known fact that much of Christian to tear oneself out of the status quo. The center of iconography and practice comes from the Pagan that Kabbalistic reality is the Shekinah, the dwelling world. And it’s not just that Leonora Carrington is of the divine presence, so she is always the one to reclaiming it; she’s saying that the Christian whom I’m calling out. Then there’s everything else. patriarchs stole it. It was all women’s mysteries at There are many women who are calling out to that one point in time, or people’s mysteries. It was same source under different names, who are taken over, renamed by the patriarchy and fighting to call out to it, or who don’t know the names to call. So it’s really important that we colonialism. So I think hers is an act not only of SK: And I’m trying to invoke her presence in one reclamation but of expansion. way or another. If we try to improvise about a painting, for instance, Grandmother Morehead’s SK: Yeah, I really like that because I think ritual is Aromatic Kitchen (1974), and we veer too far from ritual. It’s very common and very shared. It’s not the concept or vision, it simply doesn’t work. It is okay to just assign it as— not an abstract ritual but one that is already provided for in the form and question of her SA: —the sole property of one belief system. That’s paintings. I’m saying it’s different because normally ridiculous. I would try to make aspects of the training into a ritual, or a group ritual, but now the very SK: Yes. development of the project has been the collaboration. I’ve asked you in particular, Jennifer, as the lead actor playing Leonora (or invoking her), to create your own ritual inside of this process, which is sort of like saying that you will be the Priestess, say, of this whole larger ritual, and the other people involved have to be revolving around that ritual—or they’re allowed to participate in a ritual that’s been created, so you can lead them around this ritual created by us, me and Leonora. So that’s what I think is different in this work, and I really feel something deep at work in this.

SK: We should be using pomegranates as part of Photo by David Weiland the blood rituals, like we did in rehearsal. I think that’s beautiful. JJ: Thinking about ritual and ceremony and invocation, I’ve come to understand that for SA: I feel that Leonora’s descent into the “down Leonora the act of painting was an invocation. below” of her memoir Down Below (1943) was that Susan, you told me that she didn’t even really title of Persephone in the Underworld. I think that’s how many of these paintings. They weren’t mere she looked at it: she went down below, and actual narrative depictions but magical operations. I’m violation was part of it, just like in Persephone’s wondering if you could speak a bit to this idea of case. And then she escaped. invocation in terms of her artistic practice, as well I’m going to get back to your question, Jennifer: I as in the creation of Double Edge Theatre’s want to address the use of ritual. A lot of sacred art performance dedicated to her life and work, to is static and meditative. Artists and ritual magic which the three of us are contributing. How are we have always gone hand in hand, each serving the creating an individualized ritualistic practice for other from time immemorial. Leonora brings this each of us, and how has this been created for each back for via the Surrealist idiom, the performance? How do you envision this in your only movement that allowed many varieties of directing work, Stacy? esotericism fully back into modernist discourse; it was great that she did that. But I have to say that it SK: I was thinking that our process in wasn’t until I came here to Double Edge—and it developing Leonora & Alejandro: La Maga y el was a great revelation to me, thank you—that I fully Maestro is a different process than before. Maybe appreciated the extent to which Leonora was deeply it’s a similar process to Song of Absence a long time involved in theatre. She loved the ritualistic aspect ago, because it is a process where I feel like I’m of it, and you can see that in her stage designs and collaborating with Leonora directly, so my ritual is costumes. She not only wrote plays but she also with her. participated in every aspect of the theater. Although I intellectually understood all this, I had never SA: That’s really nice. experienced the kind of ritual magic aspect of her theatrical work until I watched you at work—and I saw you, just like any magician, honing down the channeler. She herself saw things; they just magic circle, asking what’s going to work, what’s appeared, she could not begin to guess from where, the distillation, how can this give us this desired and they communicated with her in visual ways, she result. I really learned a lot, and when I first came just tried desperately to catch it on canvas before here I tried to help by offering up, among other the door closed. So she was immersed in the things, the films of Kenneth Anger. Every mystery of her own visions and you get that feeling performance I witnessed here at Double Edge was when you look at certain of the works in particular. different; I could see that—I recognized the Looking at a painting like The Garden of difficulty of that skill. I think Leonora was always Paracelsus (1957) or The Candle Game (1966), doing this, too, but she’s also very British. And the they look explicitly magical; things are happening. British part of her is that biting, sardonic humor that Or even Nunscape in Manzanillo (1956). In all of often hides behind the ridiculous and the fantastical, them, there is a haziness, a vision-like feeling. A like Lewis Carroll. charged space. I see these elements in your performance. You try to direct it and control it, and you do so, but there is still that dangerous element. There is always the possibility that a spell can go awry.

Photo by Marina Levitskaya

JJ: One of the ideas you’ve spoken with us about Photo by David Weiland before, and which in fact we use in the performance, is Leonora’s ideas about the mysteries JJ: It seems to me that a lot of women’s work and that have been stolen from women’s traditions, as artwork that includes some sort of spiritualism tends well as the idea that no one can give women their to be very handily dismissed. It seems like rights because their rights are inherent; they are not Leonora’s work, because of this aspect of to be given to them since they are always already occultism, or this magic that she so authentically existing. She easily articulates something that we brings out in her work and in herself, can and has continue to grapple with in our contemporary been easily dismissed in terms of the world of art society. There’s a darkness there. I think this can history. really inspire young women. Leonora was truly radical, and when we talk to people about her they SA: Any kind of spiritual content in art tends to be all note that she was saying things that no one else viewed by the current art establishment as non- was really talking about. You both mentioned that serious, non-intellectual. Likewise, anything you felt feminism was the natural way when you spiritual or religious is a dirty word in academia; were growing up; I wonder where that came from you can’t do it. I believe Leonora’s great saving for Leonora? Was it her mother and her grace is that she’s not a proselytizer. She’s not even grandmother? really a believer in any one tradition or another; she’s a juggler, an explorer, an investigator—but SA: It was a combination of things. I believe that more importantly I believe that she is also a first and foremost she did not consider herself fully human: she was part fairie, according to family lore. having spirit—it’s looked on positively—“oh, you From a very early age she saw things; she was non- will be rich someday!” normative. She was born very wealthy but identified I also think that Leonora’s mother probably with the Irish half of the family—the Irish couldn’t contain her own spirit, even though she underclass, and everything that she associated with was married to a rich industrialist and listened to Irish knowledge traditions, which are often him (or so we think). But she obviously did strikingly non-Christian, matrilineal, and mystical. something differently with Leonora to help her Also from her Irish side was her political learn and understand her history. scrappiness and rebelliousness. Combine that with the fact that she was “to the manor born” and thus SA: Good point. well protected, this means that she also had a certain degree of privilege. And then there was her SK: You mentioned Leonora’s enormous escape. dominant personality. All these happy accidents led And she did pulled off this dramatic escape, but it to her being a visionary, but let’s make no wasn’t the only one. mistake—she also suffered profoundly. She was expelled from schools for not obeying rules, she SA: Well, yes: she called them a series of running was in constant conflict with her father, and away. although extremely intelligent had a piecemeal education at best at a series of convent schools. After being disowned by her family she went from wealth to poverty. She paid a heavy price to become an artist and to be free but being free was always her first choice. I think she was extraordinarily brave. What do you think?

SK: I think that she probably did not have a lot of choice. She was who she was and I don’t think she could fit into the box that was offered to her, even if that meant losing her wealth, which probably was the very least of it—or being raped, or having to Photo by Maria Baranova deal with all these men in the art world, or many, many other things. JJ: In The Hearing Trumpet she writes something like: be careful about what you pack when you’re SA: So she had an innate inability to conform, leaving forever. What are your thoughts about that because she was an artist. kind of escape or re-invention of one’s artistic or spiritual life? Someone once asked Leonora if she SK: Because she was an artist, and because of all thought the past ever dies, and her answer was: only the things you said. Because she had a strong spirit if the present slits its throat. She had some crucial in her, because she could see something. I think escapes—not just ideas about escape, but real seers are generally prone to having to live difficult escapes to stay alive in this world. lives. I think the fact that she could paint, for instance, probably saved her life. Because if she had SA: I can’t speak for everyone but I can speak for no way to express all this she would have been like myself, and I think that when women leave home or Cassandra: a visionary to whom nobody listened. So leave the path of normativity, it is actually a life- I think that’s probably the gift that was given to her and-death situation. I’ve done it many, many in return. I don’t think somebody like that can just times. It’s exhausting and terrifying, and you really fit in. I watched my daughter Cariel as she was come across some serious dangers. Yes, Leonora growing uo and I hoped she would not get kicked was born into some volatile times, but she created a out of schools. She wasn’t going to be able to stop lot of volatility herself as well. She was always herself. I think many women are like that. If they reinventing herself, and yet she was—remarkably— were men they’d be viewed as rambunctious, or as always the same. I think that the people around her may have changed, and the environments may have changed, but Leonora was always herself, whatever SK: That may have been her desire. Beauty did not that means. bring her many good things. Beauty made people behave toward her in certain ways. I think she SK: Which is a really difficult thing to do because, looked at Marian Leatherby, the nonagenarian at least for me—and please don’t laugh at me when protagonist of The Hearing Trumpet, with envy. I say this‚—I have often had an impulse to try to fit in a little bit more than I am called to do. People SA: I think meeting Remedios Varo (1908-1963) in might say I’m going overboard, and I wonder: am I Mexico changed her life. For the first time she had going overboard? It’s hard to adjust and still be an equal. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that; I’ve totally yourself. Leonora grew up in a patriarchal only had it once. A real meeting of the minds that aristocracy. She was looking very far back to her creates a synergistic, magical reality that profoundly ancestors, and very far forward as well. changes everything. They met when Leonora was about 26—very young. She gets to Mexico in 1942. SA: In the beginning, Leonora’s ticket out was her beauty. She had incredible beauty, and she was JJ: I’d like to talk about Alejandro Jodorowsky, charismatic. She used that beauty to get out. She whose encounters with Leonora form the basis could have used it to do what her parents wanted of Leonora & Alejandro: La Maga y el Maestro. her to do and marry, but she used it to escape, to We’ve been thinking about how unusual it was for join up with artists, and when she got to Mexico in Jodorowsky to have a female mentor. It’s important 1942, life changed and she couldn’t use it anymore, that he went looking for this, with varying success. she didn’t want to, she became serious. She wanted He brought everything he is to this search, certainly. to provide for her children, to raise her family. He is a famous personality with a large cult Remember, she was a mother first and foremost. following, a celebrity, whereas Carrington has Her husband couldn’t always do that, he was so remained lesser known, although I think this is traumatized by the war. She was always a feminist, changing, thanks to your work, Susan. It seems like but that’s where it really started to grow. You can she did not really chase that kind of notoriety. always fake it while you are an object of desire, right? But when you lose that, you go a different route, and that’s when I think she got really angry. She was always beautiful, and wonderful.

SK: I think she was still traditionally beautiful when she first got to Mexico; she could have gone a different path, but she had an animal instinct in her. There is something ferocious in her beauty.

SA: She was a beautiful warrior. She often cloaked her beauty in dowdy clothes; she wasn’t always seductive in any traditional way. Photo by Kim Chin-Gibbons

JJ: I recently read a letter that she wrote when she SA: No, she chased it; recognition that is, she was in her 30s, in which she writes that she is wanted it more than anything. She couldn’t get a preparing for death, that she has grown old. I don’t foot in the door. It was impossible. The sexism of think she seriously thought that she’d grown old, the art world is still profound. There are a few but that she’d decided to inhabit what you are women who are allowed into the sacred arena— talking about: that she’s decided to move away from Louise Bourgeois, for instance, but it’s important to youth and beauty. remember that her husband was a very famous art critic, so that helped. I would often hear Leonora SA: That’s the case with The Hearing Trumpet, too. talk about how she was one of the best artists ever! She wrote that novel when she was in her early 30s, even though it wasn’t published until much later. SK: I agree with her. SA: And I really love that about her. It wasn’t about SA: Stacy, I would like to ask you: were you drawn egoism or money; she just felt she was a really good to Leonora for this reason, or was it more the artist and she wanted people to recognize that, to esoteric content of her work that attracted you? Or see her work. was it the whole package…

SK: I don’t have any doubts about that. SK: I don’t think the esoteric can be separated from She should have been able to share her work, and an awareness of the world as ecological. One of the she was just as good as any of the surrealists: reasons that I love The Stone Door is its duality of Bunuel, Max Ernst. In my deep belief, she was far the mystical and the earthly at the same time. When more visionary.. I read this work, I’m traveling through these places and landscapes. The elements. She includes SA: The ability to work in different media, across everything, and that’s what I’m drawn to in her all media, with so much thought behind every work. It’s spiritual, it’s political, it’s life-affirming, detail. It’s appalling that she remained “forgotten” it’s all the different dimensions that we can travel for so long . And not only was she a woman, but she through. I’m not interested in fragmented art. was in Mexico. SA: I’d like to say that I’m so excited about this SK: Maybe if she had kept ties to her aristocratic performance, Leonora & Alejandro: La Maga y el family she could have used them to break into the Maestro. A lot of young women today are interested art world. in magic and witches, and it often ends up being portrayed as one-dimensional and comic-booky, but SA: But think of the great artist Lee Miller (1907- there’s a great complexity and historical depth to 1977). She was married to a surrealist, but even her this interest, as well as a contemporary political own son didn’t know to what an extent she was an urgency. I’m really hoping that people will begin to artist. Not until he found her photographs in the see Leonora Carrington a little more deeply as well, attic did he realize the full scope of her talent and with all the complexity her work contains. Magic involvement. The sexism of the art world, of the and art and creativity are linked, and that is what I surrealists— all of it—we can’t even begin to really love about Leonora as well. She would imagine the dismissal, the lack of opportunity. always say that painting is magic; it is a magical Things are better for your daughters. It’s not good act. I think all artwork is a magical act. enough, but it’s getting better.

SK: Yes, it’s not good enough. The fact that there is still a struggle to get her work out there… it’s not good enough.

SA: It’s an ongoing struggle.

JJ: Leonora Carrington was a visionary, a feminist, and an animal rights activist. She was also an environmentalist.

SA: She is a political artist.

JJ: She had such a radical imagination of the world, Photo by Marina Levitskaya of how she views humankind’s place within it. I’m : : thinking about an awareness and a thoughtfulness about land—and how this relates to Double Edge Theater’s mission, and how it relates to Carrington in turn.

Bios:

Susan L. Aberth is associate professor in the Art History and Visual Culture Program at Bard College. In addition to her 2004 book Leonora Carrington: , Alchemy and Art (Lund Humphries), she has contributed to Seeking the Marvelous: Ithell Colquhoun, British Women and Surrealism (Fulgur Press, 2020), Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist (Phoenix Art Museum, 2019), Surrealism, Occultism and Politics: In Search of the Marvelous (Routledge Press, 2018), Leonora Carrington: Cuentos Magicos (Museo de Moderno & INBA, , 2018), Unpacking: The Marciano Collection (Delmonico Books, Prestel, 2017), and Leonora Carrington and the International Avant- Garde (Manchester University Press, 2017), as well as to Abraxas: International Journal of Esoteric Studies, Black Mirror, and Journal of Surrealism of the Americas.

Jennifer Johnson joined the Double Edge Ensemble after two decades of collaboration as an actor, dramaturg, and training leader. She is a Co-Artistic Director of Double Edge, and was a co-creator and actor of Keter, the Crowning Song in the 1990s, Relentless in the early 2000s, and most recently co-created and performed as Leonora in Leonora & Alejandro: La Maga y el Maestro, which premiered in 2018. Johnson appeared in many Spectacles at Double Edge, most notably as Lucy Stone in We The People, Athena in The Odyssey and as La Senora in Once a Blue Moon, and directed the oral history project in The Ashfield Town Spectacle. She portrays Leonora Carrington in the Double Edge Fall Spectacle Leonora’s World.

Stacy Klein founded Double Edge Theatre in 1982 and under her leadership, the company has grown into one of the foremost ensemble theatres in the US. Klein has conceived and directed five original performance cycles, which have earned her international recognition for daring and innovation. In 2013 she received a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. Her work developing the concepts of Living Culture and Art Justice has been groundbreaking and an integral part of developing the DE Center. Klein’s current work relates to the Latin American cycle and includes Leonora & Alejandro: La Maga y el Maestro, Leonora’s World, and SUGA, which are touring internationally.