Woo! I am back from my vacation hiatus with ideas and obstacles of all kinds. The main obstacle is that I have yet to secure a space, but there are feelers out in all directions, so hopefully that will be resolved soon.
A meeting point of both obstacles and ideas is the performance part of my piece. I know that I want it to be structured like a Wolof lesson, as I felt that my experience was like a constant Wolof lesson -- both inside the classroom and out. I was constantly being quizzed by my Wolof teacher, my Senegalese peers, random people in taxis and on the street. And not just about my language skills, but my general cultural understanding of the Senegalese as well. When I finally learned how to make attaaya, a fairly complicated and involved tea ceremony, it was as if I passed a little test. The next time anyone asked me, "Yaangi attaaya?" (which means "Do you do tea?"), I could confidently reply, "Men naa attaaya sama bopp!" (which means "I can make tea myself!") When I could call out the merchants in the market who yelled lewd things at me, often they responded as if they were proud of me, that I could hold my own in Wolof.
So, I have a lot of conceptual thoughts about the performance, and I even have a basic outline, but I am having trouble filling in the spaces. I decided that since the performance is about learning language, and I am one of the only people I know who speaks all the languages I would be using, I will be creating the piece as a solo performance. This means that I have write myself something that will be engaging and meaningful for at least 20 minutes, and since it is about learning, it seems like it would involve other voices. I am thinking about having pre-recorded conversations, like on language learning software, where I have someone record one side of a dialogue and I will perform the other half. Part of me thinks it will be helpful in composing the piece if I break it down into units, like a class would be, and I came up with this structure: I. Basic Introductions, II. Weather, III. Food, IV. Getting to know people, V. The Market, VI. Proverbs/Idioms.
My Wolof teach in Senegal had a rigid format for our practice exercizes/quizzes, and had us memorize these little dialogues, and I am trying to figure out a way to use those structures, but give the piece some kind of development. One strategy I have thought of is the incorporation of visuals. Since most of the piece will be in Wolof, or sometimes French, it would seem I need to have some kind subtitle or supertitle. For this, I think it might be neat if I have projected translations of what I'm saying, since Wolof translated directly to English is actually really funny most of the time. In my imagination, the translations are accompanied by images and are themselves images: at the outset, the translations look like they are from the weirdo Peace Corps workbook I got at the first place I studied in Dakar; they have funny illustrations and are very neatly laid out with charts and diagrams. When I got to Saint Louis, everything became hand-written; and I recently looked back at my notebook, in which my notes became progressively weirder, messier, more scattered, and littered with bizarre drawings and side comments. As my piece goes along, I want the images to become less and less coherent, and I also want the content of the dialogue and the exercises to become more surprising.
So, I have a lot of work to do on that!


In more optimistic but no less challenging news:
A recent exciting revelation has influenced and advanced the writing portion of the piece. I have a lot of notes here and there, half written things, and nebulous ideas that have yet to reach the page about the collection of stories I want to write, but I have been having a supremely difficult time actually producing something I felt good about. What I discovered is that they needed a clearer frame, and I think the frame is going to manifest itself in a clearer narrator that isn't neccesarily just me. The recounter of these stories is the uninitiate in a land of cult knowledge, and I think what makes these stories interesting is the nearly unflappable earnestness with which I tried to make sense of things, and the comical inevitability that I never succeeded in the way I thought I would. Now, I feel like my ramblings about trips to Dogon country, weddings, odd afternoons spent with strangers, all have more of a direction.

My goals for next week are:
-To have a space, to have finished first drafts of three stories, and to have at least one act of my performance articulated.
-To assemble the lists of music I have made in various places and make sure I have the music I need.