Thursday, September 30, 2010
Loom
From 'Oedipus after Colonus'
It turns out
I spent too long in the dark
where I could see nothing
but the Masters of the World
busy at their work,
our makers and unmakers,
the evil weavers, the so-called gods.
I watched until I thought I was one of them
and could weave at the same loom
with them, and spill reality out
from my fingers as they seem to do.
From 'Book from the Sky'
Jack should have felt disappointed to have a book, of all things, loom on what had seemed an amorous horizon.
Inspiration for the Play
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The center third of "Education" (1890), a stained glass window by Louis Comfort Tiffany and Tiffany Studios, located in Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale University. It depicts Science (personified by Devotion, Labor, Truth, Research and Intuition) and Religion (personified by Purity, Faith, Hope, Reverence and Inspiration) in harmony, presided over by the central personification of "Light·Love·Life".
The two faces of Katherine Heigle were inspiration for the two children of Oedipus, Antigone and Ismene
Zoe and I looked at a long blond wig like this for about forty-five minutes one day at Rickies on 6th Ave. I had been wanting to get a thick bronze coat on her as well. That night I found this image and realized that the costume was Lady Gaga, some animal child of the 1970s, it was to be my new Ismene, until the wig seemed to suffocate the natural grace of Zoe. In rehearsal she started to look as though she was being strangled, Ismene then turned into an elegant yet touchable lady.
This is a still from a play by Wajdi Mouawad who uses projection to create beautiful stage images.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwvUlqeoCl4
Thank You Letter To Paul Gertner for his Donations to our Play through Materials for the Arts
Dear Paul Gertner,
Thank you for your donation to Materials for the Arts. The building supplies, paints, and hardware items that you generously recycled is being used for ‘Oedipus after Colonus’ an Off-Broadway play taking place September 8-12, 7pm at HERE, located at 145 6th Ave on Dominick St. For publicity the company is doing a piece called ‘Memory Theater’, it is a one-on-one theater event taking place in parks around Manhattan where we are blindfolding willing participants, guiding them and recording their personal answers to questions concerning memory. We will be posting the results on our blog oedipusaftercolonus.tumblr.com. We have heard many beautiful stories, personal details from the archives of these otherwise unheard minds. We are logging personal histories.
This is very similar to our formal play that dives into the psyche of the famed blind king Oedipus and tries to make guesses at the unknowable question of ‘What happens when we die?’ do you have an answer to that? In our show we don’t think there is a conclusion that is accurate, but we are interested in the way that everyone has a guess about the great other, the ultimate end. Everyone and anything that ever lived is now a body decayed in rot. Our history lives dissolved in the earth. The words of mythology however have been passed down between the living storytellers, and it is in fact words, and now images, that make up our own authority while living.
Thank you so much for helping our company to bring the language of the famed living poet Robert Kelly into vivid performance, your objects are currently being woven into the fabric of metaphor and slimily as we speak.
All the best to you and your business. Thank you, always, for your generosity in supporting the arts. In hindsight, the certainty and sciences of yesterday are considered blind mistakes compared to what we know now. Similarly our science and technology is doomed to a similar fate, it will be laughable once the wave of progress has moved us onto other tools and faster ways of bending nature to the wills and desires of humanity. But the writers of the human condition stay our friends and our contemporaries, be they Homer, Shakespeare, Joyce, or Poe. Having only the reality of their perception to guide them, and not claiming to know more than themselves, their readings of other writers, other thinkers, other doers, their knowledge of life, becomes a gateways for us to understand our own identity and our surroundings. The objects that you have given to our show are being transformed from their practicality into instruments that speak a language similar to music with their form, reintroduced by the staging and inference of our play.
I hope that you can make it to the show.
Thanks,
Notes for Off Broadway Play 'Oedipus after Colonus'
Speeding along through the course of life into the moment of death where he sees his other and becomes no one.
Artemis
Alchemical making into gold
The words we make into the world become the tree of knowledge that poisons us, hemlock tree, from seeing what is there without our defining. Desire and
Adam starts to name the garden after he has eaten from the tree of knowledge. It is a poisonous tree, like the hemlock that killed Socrates, we cloth ourselves in words.
Knowing without naming is the garden of eternal youth, ripe to the moment.
The human will pushes into the world, like sex bringing two people together and making something new, and in its wake, as in the beauty of the water rippling from the force of a boat, marking its path, or to “to awake” back into your own control. Naming makes the man, like clothing, dressing up what was already there in what you will it to be by your hand. The drape of the name, witches spell, alchemists bending the elements, gives you the peace of ownership, King Midas’s golden touch, to name is to own, to make solid and still what was once wildly beyond.
You can never own what you want, it is formless. We see what we want in many different forms and to complete what we are on our own through that which is a part of the shared, material, discernable world, we flow like water the only way we can go, by all the confines of stone, the ones in the world and the ones in our mind.
To one lusting, a woman is a table, or a book. She is the thing that sits between him and the constant other, sitting with him for a conversation.
A dialogue between faust and the gods.
We see the blinded eyes of Oedipus. An old hand reaches. A key. A young females eyes open. A young man’s eyes open. A young man’s hand starts to reach. Flashes of Wagner, Mahler, Busoni, James Joyce, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Socrates, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Homer. A wall of fire. We see old Faust throwing his books into the flames, bible included. Oedipus’ eyes open. We see the young man’s hand reaching. Helen of Troy, Eve, Anna Livia Plurabelle, Ondine, shone lau, psyche, cupid, Aphrodite, Priapus, an obelisk, Isis, Artemis. A wave of water. Oedipus’ eyes open. The hand reaches. A table. An ear (as in one listening). An empty page and resting pen. The holy grail. The holy grail is set on the table (display). ‘Creation of Adam’ by Michelangelo. Osiris. Zues. Lightning flashes. The eyes open. The hand reaches. A mouth moves, speaking quickly. A diagram of an atom. The Milky Way. The word ‘Logos’. A hemlock tree. The hand of king Midas. Gold. The eyes open. The word ewig. They eyes open. The hand reaches. A passionate kiss. A knife blade makes a gash in someone’s side. A hand reaches. Abraham sacrificing Isaac. Jesus on the cross with a gash in his side. Water rushes. Folio 36 of C. G. Jung’s Red Book. From it come circles of color. Eyes open. The hand reaches. Walpugis night. Mayday. Spring flowers. A classic painting depicting Holi. Colors of the rainbow flash. The hand reaches. Fire burns, water rushes, lightning crashes, the eyes open, they eyes open, they eyes open.
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