More about Suite Limpet

Suite Limpet is structured as a musical suite and consists of multiple sections involving mock historical exhibition of artifacts and first hand accounts of sea monsters, a mock bus tour theatrical performance, an actual bus tour through Acadia National Park at dusk, theatrical vignettes in the landscape viewed enroute, musical and dance perfromance on site along Otter Cove in Acadia National Park, a celestial allemande, and an afterparty open to local community members. This work admixes the life of limpets, Mdme Maria Therese DeGregoire, Galileo, a tour bus driver, and the past and future residents of Otter Creek. It explores the human history of Otter Creek and its waterfront, reminds participants of the connection between humans and the natural world, and evokes a sense of mystery and wonder about this small corner of the world.

The three performance works to date that I have created for Mt. Desert Island; “Suite Limpet”(2012), "Flotsam" (09/2011), and Graupel" (07), are an attempt to sleuth out and insert, or conjure, a sense of "hidden", or unusual, stories of human activity in the landscape. Most of the island lies within Acadia National Park - a highly controlled environment that has been largely stripped of any evidence of previous human use, and one that serves to guide and focus visitor's experience and interaction with natural elements. Little remains to remind us that humans are intrinsically connected to this place - through the living out of their lives in extreme climate, and through striving to eek out an existence over the course of time. My aim is to call attention to the places instances where humans and nature intertwine, both. 

See video of the performance here: https://vimeo.com/107594400

Dru Colbert

SUITE LIMPET

Suite Limpet, a performance installation in collaboration with writer/director Lisa Leaverton, is the third in a trilogy of performance/installation events that are focused on the landscape, history and folklore of Mt. Desert Island, Maine, and sited specifically in various locations on the island at different times of the year.  These works explore human activity and memory associated with the surrounding landscape, and are intended to conjure "hidden" histories of human occupation and experience on the island that are not covered in the guidebooks or National Park brochures.