Premiered at the P.A.R.T.S. GXIII Festival EXiiiT in July 2022.

Concept and Production: Selby Jenkins / Music: Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou, Adrianne Lenker, and Justin Vernon / Support & Special Thanks: Angel Abaya, Per Anders-Solli, Trisha Brown, Brad and Kelsie Conger, Charlie Jenkins, Chuck and Sherry Jenkins, Sara Jenkins, Diane Madden, Bart and Kathleen Neyt, Michiel Neyt, Steven Peeters, and Jamie Shropshire.

About:

To Teresa and Fred. 

in my shakin’ hands is a solo performance made and performed by Selby Jenkins. It attempts to manifest, and furthermore, retrieve the stories of two of her grandparents prematurely lost to suicide. This performance mystically hypothesizes memories about Selby’s grandparents Teresa Servatius and Fred C. Jenkins, rendering multiplicit potentialities of their ‘future’ mobility extrapolated through the descendant’s body and imagination. Uncovering a deeply personal yet profoundly political resonance of war in US American sociocultural domestic life, and the subsequent mental illness and disease created thereafter, in my shakin’ hands delicately dissects a family lineage entrenched with violence, bearing generational echoes and carrying blood across oceans.

This rendering of my grandparent’s stories as the foundational theme of my solo functions to trace and recover a historical map of my lineage, however cloaked in mystery. I employed research tactics in order to conjure the stories of my grandparents through my parents and family members: collecting information, images, and conventions that I have physicalized into a movement and spoken-word score. Inspired by Skymap (1969) by Trisha Brown, in my shakin’ hands is an attempt at an ancestral cartography, striving to (re)generate the perilous lives of two important people in mine and my parent’s life that I never had the chance to meet. This piece has encouraged, and sometimes forced me, to sit with the effects that generational trauma, coated with many acts of violence, has imposed on my physical body and emotional being. in my shakin’ hands hopes to lay bare the ambiguity of my grandparent’s stories, interlinking them into my life and shaking the trauma loose through my body that comes with their stories, and that of their continued lineage.

Photos by Mary Szydlowska