“Stirr’d Up Everywhere” is a multivoice performance piece inspired by Whitman’s autobiography, Specimen Days. The collage is intended to reenact a postmodern textual experience. Whitman–or any author–is not just the words on the page that we ascribe to him, but also the words of others about him. Four discourse territories interact dialogicaly n this piece: scientific, political, academic, and autobiographical.“
In creating these documentary collages, Lavazzi used material from botanical handbooks, Marx and Engles treatise on the American Civil War, period maps of Bull Run, critical and biographical studies of Whitman, and Whitman’s correspondences and notebooks as well as Specimen Days.
In the performance, the collage was meant to be projected on a screen or wall, or across the bodies of actors wearing clip-on lights who would recite or read lines from the poem.