Part 1 of The Whole Tragedy of the Inability to Love: SUSANSWERPHONE
Photo courtesy of the artist
“One of Copp’s great strengths is her ability to create a sense of depth, of another story folding into the dominant one.”
Dorothea Lasky, Boston Review
The first installment of The Whole Tragedy of the Inability to Love, a trilogy to be built primarily on considerations of desire and reappearance as they are taken up in the book, script, and film work of Marguerite Duras, SUSANSWERPHONE takes for its sources the 1960 film musical Bells Are Ringing, about a Brooklyn telephone answering service operator (Judy Holliday) who falls in love with a client who calls her “Mom;” Duras’ dissolving of characters’ limits in the conflation of ravishment and nonsuffering; and the imperfect quotidian as portrayed in the photographs and writing of Moyra Davey. This piece is also inspired by Holliday’s own experience with the shooting of Bells (“I was having a hard time rethinking the role for the screen”); and is a gesture toward inhabiting a particular kind of love, all current, “the taciturn wedding of an empty life with an indescribable object.”
Artists Involved: Written by Corina Copp; directed by Josh Hoglund; performed by Kate Moran, Kristen Sieh, and Jason Quarles; video and audio design by Tei Blow; design and set elements by Jeremy Lydic; produced by Allison Lyman.
Lead Artist: CORINA COPP is a writer based in New York. She is most recently the author of Pro Magenta/Be Met (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011), with publications forthcoming from Bad Press, Minutes Books, and Trafficker Press. Recent poetry, performance texts, and critical writing can be found at SFMOMA’s Open Space, The Claudius App, Boston Review, BOMB, and The Brooklyn Rail. Her plays include Tell No One (workshop directed by Josh Hoglund/Invisible Dog 2011); Waltz (directed by Meghan Finn/E. 13th Street Theater 2010); and A Week of Kindness (co-created with Kelly Kivland/Incubator Arts 2007). Copp has read and performed her own work and that of others at various venues, including DUMBO Arts Space, Triple Canopy, The Kitchen, Small Press Traffic/San Francisco, The Bowery Poetry Club, The Poetry Project, University of Greenwich Cross-Genre Festival/London, UK; Poets House, BAX, Galapagos, Little Theater at Dixon Place, Regina Rex Gallery, and elsewhere. She is a member of machiqq, a co-founder of The Twenty-Five-Cent Opera of San Francisco (2010–2011); and a former editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter (2009–2011). MFA: Brooklyn College/Mac Wellman.
Upcoming: Developmental residency at The Invisible Dog Art Center, Brooklyn, in winter 2013.