Aleta Hayes, Signing in The Room
Performance Studies international conference
Stanford University
Aleta Hayes took the Goldilocks story, you know, breaking and entering, eating someone’s porridge, napping in their bed, and turned it into a solo dance-song cycle about trespassing as sacred practice. She’s got koken with her, those “invisible” stagehands from Japanese theater who are right there in plain sight but everyone agrees to pretend they’re not, and together they’re navigating rooms the way certain indigenous cultures navigate landscape: through repeated song, through singing the space into existence as you move through it. You’re not just watching this, you’re in it, you’re the curious stranger in someone else’s house, trying to figure out what belongs to you and what doesn’t, what you’re allowed to touch. It’s Goldilocks as spiritual practice, which sounds ridiculous until you realize that’s exactly what Goldilocks was doing, trying on different lives, different sized chairs, different beds, looking for the one that fits. Hayes is asking you to feel that curiosity, that transgression, that searching for what’s “just right” in a space that isn’t yours. The sacred and the fairy tale bleeding into each other. Some rooms you sing your way through. Some rooms you have to break into. Sometimes they’re the same room.