Building The Chain
It starts as a whisper. A pull. A nuisance ignored easy enough. But as the names pour in faster & faster, the protests comfort less & less, the injustices become more brazen & neglectful- it becomes a raucous mob filling the whole room in your head, repeating the same thing it always has: What’s Next?
ONUS Chain is an ongoing journey into unpaved territories. It began as a handful of loose songs that felt like flailing at first. Those linked into a few more people who believed, like me, that there was more there than flailing, & this collective belief grew into a focused project punching in the dark at something I could feel was there but couldn’t identify. And exploring all this rage & anxiety & resolve in this new way linked into an idea to perform the work & engage the audience with its lyrics & visuals in a new, exciting way. And, weirdly enough, taking that chance brought out more people & more immediate emotion to act than we even imagined.
This is why it is called a “Chain”. Though it didn’t start as a deliberate weight, each new piece inspired the next & created an unexpected thing that feels like both defense & weapon. The idea is to build this chain with each performance, to pave further what each of us becoming a nation all our own can mean. What becoming the country we deserve demands of us. How the simple yet revolutionary decision of no longer waiting for a solution but acting feels as a new pledge of allegiance. And how, as we define this, these new borders align with those around & we, too, grow into things larger than we believe possible.