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From the first moment that I read Anne Sexton’s Transformations, their emotional truth and rawness startled me. I was fascinated with the tension between their child-like form and the very dark, adult themes Sexton wove into them. As I began to work on turning the poems into a work of theatre, it became clear that the fairy tales demanded an exploration of the relationship between the archetypal figures of the fairy tales and the psyches of my dancers. In The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim’s book on the meaning of fairy tales, he states, “If we hope to live not just from moment to moment, but in true consciousness of our existence, then our greatest need and most difficult achievement is to find meaning in our lives.” Fairy tales help us through unconscious means to understand our responsibilities, our pleasures and our terrors throughout the difficult journey from childhood to adult. This was the basis of the creative process that we used to develop this work.
By re-writing the Grimm Fairytales, Sexton explored the emotional chaos of her life through recurrent themes of love, fidelity, passion, sibling rivalry, and personal parental guilt that naturally inhabit fairytales. The best fairytales are those that depict not only our good characteristics, but our struggle with our darker inclinations as well.
Many thanks to Peggy Shannon and the Sacramento Theatre Company as well as to the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC Davis for their support of this production. My appreciation to the performers for the vital role they have played in the realization of this work.
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Della Davidson
Artistic Director
Sideshow Physical Theatre
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