Theatre of Ocean

Stories of performance between Us

This manuscript, titled Theatre of Ocean, is 100,000 words and was edited by Lauren Oyler in Berlin. 

Theatre of Ocean: Stories of performance between Us - says ‘There is nothing wrong with I. The I sometimes speaks of “we” better.’ (Chapter 11, “A Letter to Grandma”)

The work is a non-conventional narrative; a cross-cultural, feminist artist memoir best framed within the literary traditions of post-modern writing, autobiography, contemporary arts and feminism, spanning across 3 cultures including New Zealand. 

Theatre of Ocean is a memoir of a performance artist moving backwards and forwards in space and time; it is a series of stories of art and experience that interweave performance, love, art, culture, and gender politics. Framed as an autobiography, it plays on the idea of genre just as the artist's live work does by incorporating aspects of narrative, poetry, film, music, activism, travel writing, New Age ideology, academia, and performance within a metaphorical dance between cultures and art forms that is both speculative and political, wide-reaching and deeply personal. An established performance artist, dancer, choreographer, video artist, and burgeoning writer from New Zealand, Alexa Wilson guides the reader through fragmented musings that traverse the spaces between cultures, borders, art forms, lovers, identities, and times to explore a spiritual anarchism, offering reflections that stretch beyond the confines of institutions and conventional narrative.

The writing in Theatre of Ocean ranges from hyper-emotional prose-poem to academic feminist critique to humour piece. Written largely in Berlin, the book expresses a feminism through a theatre of words; the ephemeral medium of performance is articulated across cultures and times during the peak of a consumer age. Juxtaposing real stories with art works performed, scripted, staged, or improvised, Theatre of Ocean reveals an artist clawing at the possibilities for great change in the fabric of our world, in a dynamic triumvirate of settings: New York, Berlin, New Zealand. Theatre of Ocean uses its central metaphor to connect everyone and everything through a relentless ocean of performances within frameworks of experience, often violent, offering the reader opportunities for engagement. Ultimately, it is the opposite of an autobiography about an individual – it is stories of performance between an individual and her audience as well as those in her world, an autobiography about the collective forces that both affect and are affected by an individual, and what an individual can do to transform these forces.