Tom Truss and Matthew Cumbie

When we look between the lines of history books, where can we find or imagine queer stories? Co-created by Matthew Cumbie and Tom Truss, ReWritten is an iterative performance project and community engagement series that explores embodied acts of writing, social morés, and notions of queerness. ReWritten uses dance, music, visual art, projection, text, and the often overlooked intimate relationship between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville to extend the queer archive by reimagining an intergenerational queer love story - offering new ways for people to connect with each other and their writings. The relationship between Hawthorne and Melville has been characterized as one of the most mysterious and fruitful friendships in American letters, yet the letters from Hawthorne to Melville are missing. ReWritten springboards from this historic gap and time-hops between then and now as an attempt to expand how we see ourselves in these stories.