Eau de Murakami

Well, hello there, CounterPULSE blogosphere! My name is Erin Malley, and I’m one of your Winter Special Artists. I’m also a new face in San Francisco, please don’t hesitate to say hello. Better still, take me out and show me your favorite local spots! I relocated to SF just a couple of years ago from NYC, and have already fallen in love with the left coast.

My show in the Winter Special series is Hotel in a Bottle, which takes inspiration from Haruki Murakami’s fiction. After seven years of reading Murakami: longing to see his images, see his characters take physical form, to hear the music of his words and the soundtrack of his world – I took the artistic plunge and am creating this piece, Hotel in a Bottle, the manifestation of a long-term artistic desire.

At the onset, I wanted to transpose the imagery blooming in my head directly to the stage. But once I began to sift through all of the novels (good thing I like to read) to re-capture those pictures, I saw tropes running through all of his work. Characters all drank Cutty Sark whiskey, there was always a talking cat present, people descended into wells to reflect on life, and figurative parts of themselves went missing.

I decided to use those tropes to construct a new narrative. Extracting the essence of each story (“Eau de Murakami”) and transposing it to the stage has changed so much about what I had originally imagined for this piece. Over the next month and a half, follow me as I write about the journey I’m sharing with my collaborators: the new artistic processes we’ve encountered, and how they have ultimately led us towards the creation of critical fiction – a story that examines the role of media in society – for the stage.

Erin also writes about her process on her own blog: http://erinmalley.tumblr.com/