photo Courtesy of the artist

Calendar of Stone

This solo piece written, directed and performed by Denise Stoklos, presents a character in confrontation with time.  Borrowing its structure from Gertrude Stein's A Birthday Book, in which the poet writes about each and every day of a year, our character goes through 365 days during which all sorts of things happen.  Simple, daily events coexist with profound, existential questions.  It is not relevant whether the character is male or female, rich or poor, young or old, only that her basic necessities have been met.  It could be anyone in the audience or the performer herself. Inside the endless repetition of one day after another, we eventually find cracks though which we encounter places where chronology is no longer relevant.

No documentation of this performance was permitted by the artist.

Biography

Denise Stoklos began her career in 1968 as a playwright, director and actress in Brasil. In 1987, while visiting New York for four months on a Fullbright, she created "Denise Stoklos in Mary Stuart" for La Mama Theatre. Since then she has world premiered plays in New York each year. These include "Hamlet in Irati" and "Casa". In 1992 she created "500 years - a fax from Denise Stoklos to Christopher Columbus," in 1993, the romance "Tomorrow will be late and the day after tomorrow doesn't even exist," in 1994, her version of the Greek myth "Un-Medea," in 1995 "Elegy," (with the participation of her two children Piata and Thais), and in 1996 "Heavier than the air/Santos Dumont." In October 1997 "Civil Disobedience" based on Henry Thoreau's text premiered in Parana and Rio. In 1999 she created "Dissonant Voices" for the 500 year anniversary of the discovery of Brasil, which was perforformed in many cities. In 2000 Ms. Stoklos created and performed "Louise Bourgeois: I do, I undo, I redo" in New York city, with scenography exclusively created and built by the great sculptor Louise Bourgeois. In the first semester of the year 2000 Ms. Stoklos was a professor at New York University, invited to teach her "Essential Theatre" for Masters and Ph.D. students at the Department of Performance Studies. She has published seven books of plays. Denise Stoklos' theatrical proposition is outlined in "The Essential Theatre", a theatre made with only the actor's instruments: body, voice and mind/intuition. Ms. Stoklos performs her plays in Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, Russian, Ukrainian and German. Since 1986 Ms. Stoklos has performed frequently in important international events in thirty-one different countries.