on being loved
...:::upon awakening to the midnight sun:::...
On Tuesday evening @ Geek Meets Grid - the GeekAustin 8th Anniversary Party, I first talked with Sky from Hipnautica about doing a Butoh performance during Awaken (bizarrely, the footage of my Butoh performance was stolen, although there's some video of me playing percussion with Hipnautica during Awaken I, here... and there's an awesome photo of my harlequin character who made a brief cameo during Awaken II, here). Over the next couple of days, I contemplated different perspectives on the idea. Although years ago, I had worked on Butoh-inspired projects with Dougie, Vekquin, Brian Green, The Vortex Repertory Co., and the Groovepharm... and I have attended performances of Sankai Juku & Buto-Sha Tenkei... I found the most inspiration for this particular Butoh project from the book "Towards an Archaeology of the Soul" that I picked up from Antero & Sylvi Alli after the premiere of their film, The Invisible Forest:
Click to viewFor a more thorough explanation of this process, please refer to this Orientation: Towards a Ritual Technology for Self-initiation. And to explain why this particular method was so appropriate for my purposes, I should stress the importance of differentiation between social & asocial ritual.
As you might imagine, the Butoh piece I developed for Awaken was an extremely asocial ritual, perhaps even more similar to something like this excerpt from Orphans of Delerium:
I did not fully realize how profound the difference was going to be for me, compared to the mostly social rituals that I have been designing for the past few years. Although, I have to admit that I do often attempt to cross the streams, in one way or another. As I discourage dogmatism/fanaticism & encourage experimentation, I generally believe that synthesis can be beneficial in some, even many, but not all cases.
However, there is a rather prescient passage from the book that has been haunting me, this weekend... regarding paratheatrical work:
"This ritual work functions best in a socially austere environment that does not encourage personal and social "validating." Oftentimes, participants don't even know each other socially. I've never been able to instigate and fully participate in any ritual lab until my survival needs are met first (shelter, food, work, love). I think anyone planning to participate in this medium should first establish an active social life outside the lab and find somebody to love because these rituals won't do that. They're too rooted in transformative processes to conform to social agendas like needing approval, strokes, status, support, courtship, etc. People with frustrated social needs for love tend to eat up valuable group time by demanding way too much attention for themselves."
I realize that I still have work to do in regards to finding a balance between my social & asocial needs. Having been raised by performers, I tend to crave a lot of attention... all the world is a stage, after all! But I don't want all of the focus to be on me all of the time, I just desire a high degree of interactivity in my relationships. For instance, I prefer to develop long-term bonds of deep friendships rather than short-term superficial acquaintances.
With my 20-year HS Reunion coming up next year, I cannot help but reflect upon cycles that started back in Jr. High, when I helped found a psychedelic hardcore punk band with my gamer buddies that we called Psychivore... one of our taglines was "devouring the mind & all that resembles it" ...we performed extreme socio-political satire and surrealist agit-prop actions... often used strobe lights, black lights, & day-glo paint along with zany props, rituals, & ceremonies... really a chip off of the ol' austin psychedelic block... but we often played to audiences who had never experienced such things. The reactions we got from our audiences were usually either stunned gaping open mouthed awe or rioting in sheer revulsion horror & anger. Fortunately, we were generally prepared for these things. For instance, when police were called out to the riot that broke out at our High School talent show (at Reagan H.S.), after interviewing everyone, the authorities were actually on our side. Upon hearing about some of our show's content, one officer (who was a self-proclaimed fanatic Stephen King fan) really wanted to know more about H.P. Lovecraft, of whom he had never heard, before. But after a few years & a number of bizarre incidents that seemed to stem from failures to communicate, I eventually began to question whether we might be missing something important about the whole situation. I started to wonder if there might actually be another way to develop and maintain a dialog with our audience. For one thing, I thought we might consider working with other emotions besides anger, fear, and the strange.
Ironically, this month I am also starting to work with a Vortex Repertory Co. on a haunted house called, The Shocker. From my experience having worked in The Haunted Forest, and The Cthulhu Devival, I have found success with implementing a particular theory... my results indicate to me that fear can create a hypnotic state in people. But as we all know, hypnosis is self-induced. It can be facilitated by someone else, but it is something in which each individual has to willingly participate for it to actually work. There are tricksters in the world who, for one reason or another, will attempt to sway people's wills towards their own ends... whether they shroud such designs as being humanitarian & compassionate, or even if they are simply megalomaniacal or sadistic. So, for complete disclosure (& since I brought it up, anyway) I want to make it clear that my intent in recognizing this phenomenon is to wake people up and encourage them to make their own decisions to participate in writing, rewriting and enacting whatever the scripts are that may guide them in their lives. In the context of people going to a haunted house, they have made a willing decision to challenge themselves by facing situations in which they may experience fear-states... I simply want to give them a proverbial silver cord to help guide them in their journey through our underworld... and perhaps even help them find archetypal muses who may assist them in developing motivation for their participation within our psychodrama shadowplay.
Oops, I'm late, I'm late... it's past time for me to run down to the studio for ecstatic dance!
We will now return you to your irregularly unscheduled reprogramming: