‘”Der Igel” / Artwork by Marion Donehower
Performance Video of the Tale for Groundhog’s Day
A fragment, like a small work of art,
must be entirely isolated from the surrounding world
and be complete in itself
like a hedgehog.
— Friedrich Schlegel
Athenaeum Fragments, 1798
This little tale of Change and Transformation is itself a change and transformation of a Märchen from the Grimm collection called “Hans My Hedgehog.” Perhaps a better word for what I have done here is the German word “Umstülpung”—quite a mouthful in English. It’s a word whose meaning, “inversion,” also carries the connotation of “a deep opening process of turning a social field completely inside-out and outside-in, of upending things.”
— Bruce Donehower, from the Afterword
9.1.22