Director: Sylvia Toy St. Louis and Michael Lewis.

This video performance portrait is based on a poem about an elderly woman whom I frequently saw on Montgomery Street in San Francisco on the way to dayjob for several years. She moves like only old dancers move in spite of her obvious mental disturbances, i.e., paranoia, mumbling to herself etc. The grace of that well trained body carries her quite magically through the crowds of workers of whom she seems so afraid. Art seems to be in her blood stream, in every single cell of her body and happening all the time even though she's not in a pracice room or on stage due to sheer muscle memory of making art.

Director: Elise Kermani.
In Sophocles' play "Oedipus Rex" Jocasta hangs herself shortly after finding out that Oedipus is both her husband and son. In Euripides' play "The Phoenician Women", Jocasta stays alive a little bit longer to try and reconcile her sons but stabs herself shortly after they kill each other during the war at Thebes. But in Kermani's film "Jocasta", Jocasta stays alive after her sons' mutual murders to perform a sacrifice to save Thebes, and to satiate Ares' ancient fury of Kadmos' slaying of the dragon. Jocasta chooses the creative act of writing over suicide. Her ritual act remembers that Body is Presence (Plato's 'ousia' and Heidegger's 'Ereignis') and Jocasta reminds us that she (also known as Iocasta) is related to Io, the Great Cow goddess of Egypt. The origins of writing are sacred manifestations of ousia/hestia...esti/Being. She reverses the taboo of incest, and reestablishes the symbollic image of mother and son. Jocasta's sacrifice was inspired by an ancient Persian ritual of ingesting the Word to cure illness. www.elisekermani.com/jocasta.html www.elisekermani.com/thejocastaproject.html