Wilder Than walls

Crankie Script Background:

Wilder Than Walls is a collaborative cyanotype-based crankie made with muslin, paper-cut shapes, printed negatives, and found objects.

I wrote the original script at a Blue Mountain Center residency in the summer 2022 based on readings, observations, and journaling. Then, in winter 2023, my collaborator - artist, musician, energy worker, and doula - Allie Fitzgibbon, led us through a song-writing workshop to transform the long-form poem into a song, providing the chorus, melody, and thematic edits to fit the crankie format.

Inspirational texts include: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, A Cross-Cultural Critique of Ecofeminism, ed. Greta Gaard, The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, Women Who Run with the Wolves, by Clarrisa Pinkola Estes, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice by Jessica Gordon Nemhard, Love Poems in the Time of Climate Change, by Craig Santos Perez, and many more journal and research articles and poems!

Performances:

We have performed the crankie at the Black Cherry Puppet Theater, The Maryland Center for History and Culture, The Locally Grown Festival at Baltimore’s Center Stage, and the Climate Change Theater Action event at The Creative Allliance, with shadow puppets by Baltimore puppeteer Jess Rasp.

CHORUS:

The rivers that flow
Flow in their time
And dams built break
In their time
Oh heart pulsing sky
Love of mine
Finding your sweet song in ocean brine
We are louder than whispers
And wider than walls
It’s time my love, it’s time

Crankie Script: VERSe 1

There is a status even meaner than ugliness and disorder,
Where the blight of dullness turns gray greener
And the streams start to taste like chlorine water
Overly pruned and under control.
a box of new crayons with new wax tips
They don’t know yet their fate
Rubbed, chewed, slid, squeak, spit
Into the street, where we all fit
The sloppy exposed, heard through open glass
sing louder multi-organism, let this noise last
an earth-shattering baritone in the rising dawn
A cocophony of words we live inside of
Stroll easier, slinking creatures of night
stay clear-eyed in the glaring sunrise
Know, Life and Death are ordered disorder

close up of the crankie showing a paper cut elephant mom and baby — Still from crankie

Crankie Script: VERSe 2

When did the hope of the commons become the tragedy?
In my version trespassing is just walking (wall-king)
What would it take to regularly rotate- roles
matriarchal mantarays- rituals of care in the sea below
like our Herd of dolphins, our Hills of ants, our Hives of bees -BEHOLD!
show up, sink back, take turns, and share
knowing there’s enough to make the cycle whole
A network of minds builds a stronger resolve
For our dramatic shifts and the slow creeping crawl
Build us a huddle to lay on when it comes time to fall
-
Do elephants break each other’s hearts as far as humans roam?
Do dolphins get jealous enough to go through life alone?
I remind myself its ok to love this child, removed one step
and the mother she came from, love is not a document
Yet every blade of grass pays a tax
I want our hands to run clear incollective lament

Crankie Script: VERSe 3

Where does my natural body meet this cultural state?
When we lose our connection to the earth
Do we mean we’ve lost a connection to ourselves?
Can you control a tornado’s path
As it cuts through the corn fields?
Listen deeper, the tone of their voice is steady
The wild wind lives in throats untamed
And cells regenerate as we nurture nature
Birthing bodies surrender to pain
To birth and death and birth
And people breed each other and others
And babies are ripped from utters
And worms glide past the seed
The dirt frees what feeds
You planted it here
Is it yours or just near you?
Who has the cognition to rule recognition?
Not the elephant and monkey admiring their new births
A slimy slope sure to drown the vulnerable first

Maura Dwyer performs with the crankie during the Climate Change Theatre Action event at the Creative Allinace, Dec 5 2023

Crankie Script: VERSe 4

Monarchy is the submission of buzzing transcendence
All hale to the earthly feminine as she hauls her hive from plymouth
But no colony is truly ruled by its queen
Once dispelled the hive seeks a new scene
The softness of fur, the flit of a wing
This sweet enclave is not serving the machine
But let honey fester for 100 years
and it will sour and harden into america’s true fear -
Dread of the alien invader
How did these creatures become the villain to our savior?
Fine-tuning the forgetting of our histories,
Deafened by bombs decapitating hillsides
Yet - there’s still time.
Let’s pivot this tragic trajectory
Listen - The civic bee’s buzzing can still be heard…

Allie Fitzgibbon sings and performs with the crankie during the Climate Change Theatre Action event at the Creative Allinace, Dec 5 2023

ENDING SPELL:

My sweet honey bee, we forgive your trespasses learned

it was not your destined path that brought you here

May you find balance and joy in pollenating our earth

until every tree, replanted and every drop of water runs clear