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Janet Haley: I'm gonna talk about the things that inspired the project and is most special
to me and it's uh, sort of our mascot for the project, so it's not just a person, it's
actually uh, it's not a biography, it's um, it's this um, this statue and we're getting
footage of it so we'll be able to surround. This is the back of the west half of the cemetary
where the production takes place and I was always intrigued by, you stand on the ground
and you look up at it and you see the sky. So this skyward, hopeful experience that this
is of looking up at the blue sky with this woman holding her heart and her eyes are closed
and it looks like she's inhaling the breeze and the air and just taking a breathe. That
is what came to me when I looked at this. And I just, this was the place, my favorite
place in the cemetary and this project being a theatre of place project that we're responding
to the place and the stories of the real place. Well, then I, looking at the field guide that
Phillip gave us, I came to learn that, look at this, her hand there. Hope is often seen
with wings and ? have its wings, which probably upset the balance of virtues. But she is almost
always seen with an anchor, an ancient symbol of hope. I was doing some research in South
Carolina and visiting cemetaries and there was this very same statue, this was in May,
that the arm was restored and I realized that what's behind her is actually an anchor. If
you can see the break of it. There's a part of an anchor so her hand would have been this
long anchor and that is now gone and the serendipity of the one aspect of this place that has been
most inspirational to me, or creatively, or sort of intuitively was the virtue of hope
which is the project's, one of themes of the project is hope and that hope is active and
you know, like the anchor and the rope casts out and the ship, the ship is at sea and things
happen, but it's still anchored. It's that action of that tension of the rope is still
positive and nuturing and engaging. So basically, I pretty much wept when I discovered that.
And um, and then she's gone on to inspire this central character. And I also really
like how her broken arm, she's you know, she needs a little bit of restoration, but she's
still standing and she's still looking, she's still moving forward.