As some of you know, last week I had the opportunity to see the play “Glory!”.  I’ve been struggling ever since with how to put words around that adventure. It’s not so much that I feel compelled to explain it (I’m not sure I could), but the experience was remarkable and I want to invite others to have it and to consider what they encounter for themselves. You can find details and tickets here. There are shows tonight, tomorrow and Sunday.

Having said that, I am going to offer a couple of possible points of entry in this blurb, because this Sunday morning our guest will be Dasha Plett, one-half of the independent theatre company We Quit Theatre, who produced the play. As is often the case with independent arts productions, Dasha also wears the hat of sound designer for the production, and plays a character in it. And, for anyone that doesn’t already know, is our beloved trans daughter. The show closes this coming Sunday, but we get to chat with Dasha in the morning before she zooms off to prepare for the final matinee performance.

So, what is “Glory!” about, and what does that have to do with exploring what we believe?  In today’s Free Press review, Ben Waldman calls it “a brilliant, modernist portrait of trans liberation — from theatrical expectation, from societal oppression and from the rigid binary gazes that silence, censor and threaten equitable expression by marginalized groups.” There’s a lot packed into that sentence, but to help us connect this to why The Table exists, I want to focus on the last bit – “the rigid binary gazes that silence, censor and threaten equitable expression by marginlized groups”.

In this instance, the marginalized group that is centred is trans people. We’ll talk about that on Sunday, not as theory but with a trans person who knows what it’s like to live with it. But that wider category of “marginalized groups” can cover a lot of ground, and being silenced or sidelined by binary thinking can apply to a lot of the current zeitgiest. And that includes people who find themselves exploring what they believe, and coming up against “rigid binary gazes” that are inclined to attempt to control or eliminate that freedom.

On their website, We Quit Theatre desribes Glory! as a “a contemporary dance docu-drama and a transfeminist fantasia”.  A fantasia is a work (such as a poem or play) in which the author’s fancy roves unrestricted. In other words, it’s a place where the creator(s), and in this instance the audience, is free to explore what they believe. Sounds like a good fit to me!

We’ll meet at VA Cafe at 10:45 am for some Community Time and our conversation with Dasha. You can see her explain a bit about both the play and what we’ll be on about this Sunday here.  And/or, show up in person to be part of the conversation. We’ll also livestream our chat here and podcast it later in the week here.

So many links, so many possibilities for exploring what we believe!

I’ll see you on Sunday.