This piece is a premier of a work in progress (they are all a work in progress) performed June 2019 titled: “June Bug Rolls Toward the Sun Like a Scarab”. It is a multimedia dance theater performance about dating, dance, and parenting with Attention Deficit Disorder. On a quest for true love and artistic survival, Boubion’s transformation from larvae to beetle draws from The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, The Ancient Text of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, The Myth of Sisyphus by existential philosopher, Albert Camus, and her personal stories as a queer Latinx dance animal.  The piece begins with a monologue and ceremony with humor, desire and political charge that creates context and content for a culturally nuanced and personal story to unfold. The multimedia component was set within the environment of live text, voice overs, live music, props, costume changes and video layering of actual beetles and her dancing that was shot in natural locations in Sonoma county. The dance is grounded in research about beetles, scarabs and neuropsychology within the embodied genre of Magical Surrealism and the radical feminist aesthetics of Grotesque Burlesque.

(LARVAE re-staging Summer 2020 CANCELLED DUE TO COVID-19)

Choreography, text, costume, video design, and overall structure by: Liz Boubion  

Directed by: Kimberly Lester

Videography: Matthew Sigal, Mark McBeth

Sound design in collaboration with Micropixie (aka Neshma Friend).  

Text in the last section of the piece is an English translation from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a prayer/spell engraved upon the scarab amulet worn by the dead:

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O MY HEART OF MY MOTHER! O MY HEART OF MY MOTHER! O MY HEART OF MY DIFFERENT FORMS! DO NOT STAND UP AS A WITNESS AGAINST ME, DO NOT BE OPPOSED TO ME IN THE TRIBUNAL, DO NOT BE HOSTILE TO ME IN THE PRESENCE OF THE KEEPER OF THE BALANCE, FOR YOU ARE MY KA WHICH WAS IN MY BODY, THE PROTECTOR WHO MADE MY MEMBERS HALE.

GO FORTH TO THE HAPPY PLACE WHERETO WE SPEED, DO NOT MAKE MY NAME STINK TO THE ENTOURAGE WHO MAKE MEN. DO NOT TELL LIES ABOUT ME IN THE PRESENT OF THE GOD. IT IS INDEED WELL THAT YOU SHOULD HEAR! BOOK OF THE DEAD, SPELL 30B

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*note: Since creating this piece, I have adopted the research-based knowledge that ADHD is not a learning disability. It is a second nervous system divergent from typical thinking styles.