“Communally Co-created Ritual
loving, honoring, remembering, nostalgic, bittersweet
we are a village
we tell ghost stories. who/what are our ghosts?
ritual has very prescribed steps
we need to sing old songs / new songs
we need to make spirit houses for our ghosts
costumes, banners, crowns/garlands
cozy
harvest
it’s in the woods”
-with and for Latrelle Bright
A friend and dear colleague passed away this semester. Her name is Latrelle. She’s the kind of artist/educator/delight who spent her time co-creating communities, rituals, connections. Lives. She taught theater, and so much else. I can’t begin to say what she taught me. That we can come together, more meaningfully or more gently and more powerfully than we have yet hoped?
The text above is from a thought map that was pinned up at a celebrations for Latrelle a few days after she passed away. I think it was from her friends and colleagues, co-creating the ritual that I was at when I saw it. The celebrating and remembering rituals that went on to an afternoon in the park with music and movement a few weeks later. Beneath trees, so almost in the woods. It could just as easily be from something Latrelle taught. She taught that way. Grounded in theater, she called it devising: a bringing together of our ideas, a recognizing of where and who we are, and how we’re moving, until we’re moving together. And maybe it’s really both: because like so many others, I speak Latrelle sometimes, or she speaks me, her laughters and reminders on my lips. Maybe I’m writing this because I want to co-create with her again. Maybe because she’s still co-creating me, and us. We tell ghost stories. We need to sing old songs / new songs. Cozy. We harvest. We gather together. We gather ourselves. We gather fruits and breaths and moments from the trees and grass and each other. Gather lives. It’s in the woods.
Azlan Guttenberg Smith 