Declarations

Jordan Tannahill

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781770565449
• Subtopic: Canadian Drama
• Index: Literature

This is a pressed bruise. This is Greta Garbo's smile. This is the smell of Windex. Declarations is an imperfect chronicle of a life lived; a body pulled through time, encountering meteorological phenomenon, mythology, political calamity, pop culture, and everyday happenstance along the way. Written in the wake of his mother's terminal cancer diagnosis, Tannahill's Declarations is a staggering archive of sensations, memories, and voices asserting that here lived, for a time, a woman.

Jordan Tannahill is an Ottawa-born, London UK–based playwright and filmmaker. His work has been presented at major theaters and festivals across Canada and internationally.

Declarations

A bare stage, stripped of masking.

1 enters.

She stands for a moment.

She then proceeds to make a series of declarations, each accompanied by a gesture. The gesture is meant to illustrate the image or idea contained within the declaration. The gestures are governed by the fifteen rules set out on pages 9–10.

The text is fixed, but the gestures are not: the performers must rediscover each gesture afresh, night after night. The difficulty – and humour – inherent in this nightly feat of improvisation should emerge but not distract.

1: This is the thing

This is not the thing

This is my mother

This is her eyelash

This is a flag

This is an empty promise

This is the speed of light

This is a chewed fingernail

This is a pocket with a hole in it

This is Saturn

This is political

This is the morning light

This is the morning light coming through the window

This is her body in the shower

This is the warm water falling

This is her dying breath

This is my heart in the morning

This is her laughter

This is her absence

This is the state of things to come

This is a dog

This is how I lie down

This is Ikea

This is a year

This is a child

This is a life

This is a street corner

This is a car speeding

This is the hard part

This is Tuesday

This is the colour red

This is the smell of freshly cut grass

This is the end of the world

This is me ignoring you at a party

This is time itself

This is my hand

This is me clapping

This is the distance between us

This is my father leaving when I was two

This is a swing set in the backyard

This is God

This is a plastic cup of apple juice

This is a shady street in the suburbs

This is a two-storey house with wall-to-wall carpet

This is life on Earth

This is the colour green

This is a witness

This is me wetting the bed until I was twelve

This is an erection

This is a secret

This is a weapon

This is me, coming apart at the seams

This is my first sexual encounter

This is a country

This is a map of the country

This is a scar

This is my mother on the beach

This is the length of a human tongue

This is a high school parking lot

This is the smokers’ corner

This is physics

This is a forest full of beer bottles

This is the place where I lose you

This is snow

This is our neighbourhood

This is a motel

This is your uncle in his white briefs

This is my mother alone with her thoughts

This is the weight of the world

This is the funeral

This is a rim job

This is the earth seen from space

This is a lifelong fear of heights

This is a shitstorm

T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Playwright’s Note
• Performance History
• The Gestural Score
• Declarations
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author