Sonia Laposi is a student at the University of Waterloo and also a witness to our work with Edna’s Archive during our run at IMPACT09. She has sent us a sensitive and responsive piece on her response to the work. We are deeply thankful to her.
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“I remember looking at the audience near the end of the show, and I felt a sense of wonder, as I saw two particular women look at the pictures of Enda and at the production taking place, because I wasn’t looking at them defensively or competitively, and they weren’t focused on that either, but on Edna, and they had empathy and kindness on their faces.
“The process put me in a position of awe, it was a way of concentrating my mind on the pictures, and putting a desire in me to really absorb them as much as possible. I remember feeling near the end, something inspiring. The production was able to simulate some moment of Edna and represent Edna in a way that every person wants to feel: fierce, passionate, and alive.
“But because this was someone’s real, <<unfiltered>> life that you were using, I felt it was important to keep a distance, not to ask personal questions and to quantify, because someone like me would get lost in that; but to focus on the immaterial, and that is what lead to the reaction I had, and saw others having, after the show. It is deeply personal to examine someone the way “Edna” examines Edna, and as an audience member, to expose yourself to such heavy, fragile, human stuff, that it was necessary and re-affirming to really express how I felt. I saw myself as an Edna, I saw myself expressed in years, and in this overview, this body of time, I wondered how my <<spirit>> was beating. I guess I was able to see my life not as a moment, but as having a beginning and an end, also as a work of art from that aspect, and that made me summon this energy to really want to capture what it was that my life was. And so I felt inspired.”
~Sonia Laposi
