Iron Shoes

Kitka, in collaboration with lead artist/stage director-choreographer Erika Chong Shuch, members of Erika Chong Shuch’s dance-theater company The ESP Project, composer Janet Kutulas, and production designer Allen Willner respectfully request a New Music USA grant to support the creation, presentation, and documentation of a new vocal-dance-theater work entitled Iron Shoes.

A contemporary, neo-feminist, folk opera combining original music, powerful singing, movement, text, humor, and environments of light, Iron Shoes will transform source material drawn Eastern European fairytales into a contemporary performance experience. Departing from conventional narrative forms, the collaborators will embark on an imaginative, evocative, and entertaining journey that uses archetypal elements from the tales as points of departure from which to explore themes of female empowerment and disempowerment, confinement and mobility, youth, age, and relationship to self, others, daily life, and dreams.

Iron Shoes imagines the meeting of three young women, inspired by characters from three separate Slavic fairytales. In the original stories, each maiden has been doomed (for different reasons) to wander the earth in iron shoes. It is only when each one has worn out three pairs of these shoes that she can hope to find ease, happiness, and authentic love. Other prominent characters in the tales include three Baba Yagas (powerful, destiny-making, wildly unpredictable, old witches), and each young woman’s lover. Interestingly, each of the male lover-characters is also navigating his own way through a set of curses, including being trapped in the form of an animal, such as a falcon or a pig.

Magic shoes appear in countless fairytales across many cultures. Shoes contribute to each story’s action by enabling or prohibiting mobility through time and space. Enchanted footwear can be involved in dancing, flight, wandering, shape-shifting, escape, invisibility, or shaking the earth. In fairytales as well as in everyday life, shoes convey powerful messages about social status, role-identity, strength-fragility, and gender-sexuality. Perhaps the most important part of our clothing, shoes represent our position in relation to reality, our social status, how solidly our feet are established on the ground. Shoes immediately communicate who we are, and what path we are embarking upon.

The iron shoe motif in Slavic fairytales is most often associated with a difficult quest or challenge faced by the protagonist. Iron itself is rich in symbolism and meaning. The 10^th most abundant element in the universe, iron represents the planet Mars in astrology. In alchemy, iron rules physical strength and represents male energy. (The symbol for iron is the “male” symbol, a circle with an arrow pointing upwards and to the right). Metaphorically, iron represents discipline or a need to temper primal urges. Everyday speech reveals even more layers of meaning for iron: an iron will, constitution, grip, or resolve… ironing out problems, having many irons in the fire, etc. To be “in irons” is to be shackled. But iron can also be a tonic, a strengthening supplement connected to life-blood.

A 6-performance premiere run is planned for May, 2016 at The Crucible in Oakland, CA.