OWS: Going for the "Ground Truth"

Excerpts from Ground Truth by Emily Tschiffely
Music by Paperclip Scientists
all rights reserved copyright 2011

I began working on this last year; the music came first from a brilliant writer/musician, Vince Johnson. In Mississippi, over these past two years, I have been really inspired to speak truth to our collective reality as a country (I am originally from Maryland) and this music gave me the right hallway to starting moving in. I completed four sections this summer in Brazil and I am currently working on three more. Our show will include varying solo sets by the band and sections of dance from me, interspersed with video and other features. 

We would like to perform in any place that will have us, including the public spaces of the Occupy Movements that are currently in residence around the country. For me, I need to start making art about what is actually happening in the physical sphere. If I am to be an artist in my country and I do not make work about the drainage we are experiencing, then I am way off course. 

I am inspired to join the movement with both this work and the teaching that I now do in the Cleveland Public School District in the Mississippi delta. I live in the birthplace of the most original thing that ever happened in Western music--the blues. I live twenty minutes south of the crossroads and ten minutes north of the dockery plantation. I am teaching the children of Fannie Lou Hamer (not literally) and am so inspired by the strength and dignity that grew out of transforming the pain of this place into beautiful amazing music.

We want to come to your town and country. Email here. Thanks for watching.

--Emily Tschiffely