This will actually happen...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: (thanks to G)

AUNT AND NEPHEW TEAM BRINGS FAMILY HISTORY TO LIFE WITH PERFORMANCE ART

(HANOVER) September 22, 2013 – Performance art comes to Hanover’s John Curtis Free Library with Betsey and Gregory Josselyn’s newest work, This Will Actually Happen, supported in part by a grant from the Hanover Cultural Council. This Will Actually Happen, a performance, painting, and artifact display inspired by the early twentieth century diaries of the late Hanoverian Nora Hanson, is easily belied by its apparent simplicity. But the closer you look – or, the harder you listen, and the more vibrantly you imagine – the more you begin to see in Nora's period relics and life story, as her seemingly mundane diary entries transform into reflections on memory and inheritance, reminding listeners of their own struggles to constitute histories and identities from invisible fragments.

"It all started when I began sorting through my grandmother’s things — her diaries, photographs, a Waltham Watch, even an old pickle fork . . . " says Betsey Josselyn. "Last year, my nephew was living in London studying performance art and he was homesick, so he wanted to make a piece about Hanover. He approached me about making a show about my grandmother Nora's life based on the objects she left behind. We haven’t stopped since."

Although the piece offers historical musings on the years leading up to Nora’s wedding engagement from 1919 through 1922, the real story showcases Betsey’s and Gregory’s process of translating all of Nora’s archives into a cohesive art piece — to give her life again — and encourage audience members to reflect on their own family legacies. It will also feature oil paintings by Betsey Josselyn of Nora’s objects. Since the performance’s original presentation in London in May 2012, This Will Actually Happen played at Mobius, an experimental art venue in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Norfolk Street. “It just so happened that Nora (my great-grandmother), the subject of the performance, used to live ten minutes from Mobius’ venue, on Broadway near Kendall Square, a few years before she moved to a house on Hanover’s Broadway where my Aunt lives today,” Gregory Josselyn reflects. “Especially since it was foreign to perform it in the United Kingdom, it felt absolutely necessary to bring it back to Hanover (where I grew up) in order to honor her memory.”

Betsey and Gregory Josselyn’s This Will Actually Happen premieres Saturday, October 19 at 3:00pm at the John Curtis Free Library, 534 Hanover Street, Hanover, Massachusetts. The performance is free and no tickets are required. For further information, please contact Gregory Josselyn at gjosselyn@gmail.com.

For the Record,
This day came in sunny and cool, the seasonal shift to Autumn is begining and I'm smiling.