I grew up on the New England coast near the small port of Manchester-by-the-Sea. Living here now in Southern California, where there is seemingly no season and cloudy days are few and far between, I began to feel homesick. There was an urge with this project to recreate the feelings being back home evoked, the memories of walking the beach and looking out past the fishing boats, past the lighthouse. Yet, this isn’t a re-creation, more so a simulacrum of an unknown place in an unknown time imagined in those shared memories and emotions remembered by the salty air and ocean breeze. It’s a jumble of memories from the rocky shores of Maine to the imagined memories of ruins in the Mediterranean, places far apart but connected by those same feelings that seem to float through the air and crawl through the sand to connect us. We related this work to the directorial work of Julie Taymor, specifically the set design of her film adaptation of “Titus Andronicus” which sets itself in Rome in no certain era, but rather a mash-up of all of the past and memories of Rome, foregrounding Toga-clad politicians giving a press conference to reporters in front of the fascistic architecture of Benito Mussolini. We sought this further by finding a place that’s no certain location holding evocations of different objects and architecture near the sea. In doing so we explicitly do not create anywhere in particular, but somewhere. To quote John F. Kennedy, “we are tied to the sea.” In truth no matter where in the world, something, somewhere calls us back to the sea.
