WURF
An Introduction
WURF (from the German Gewurfenheit - 'thrownness', 'the state of being thrown') emerged first in a poem called Cocoons, written about fifteen years ago. In it freedom and growth, associated with breaking out of the shell of an egg, are inseparable from journeying into your natural fears and phobias,
"The agoraphobic walks into the desert...
The claustrophobic locks himself in a box...
The dancing, dangling marionette shears the strings..."
This image of a puppet cutting his own strings stuck with me, and I began to see it as a theatre piece. I borrowed a harness from a stage production company incorporating bunjee jumping and invited a group of dancers to begin experimenting with interacting with 'the puppet'. From there the story grew in my mind into a full-blown opera, or what I would later refer to as 'Sonic Theatre'. Having cut his strings WURF would fall - into the world - and that is where his adventures would begin. A Pinocchio creation myth, an innocent hurled into the whirld, ...
Unable to work in the harness I moved onto what I envisioned as sequences of the performance subsequent to the fall. In 1996 Rhizome, a dance piece featuring poetry, choral sound poetry and live music, directed by Kelly Thornton, was workshopped and performed with great success at Residence, The Bathurst Street Theatre and Livestock.
In 1997, with a new cast, this time directed by Alex Poch-Goldin, Cirque-Samsara mounted Mediador, a multimedia spectacle featuring live and pre-recorded video projection, live music, spoken word and dance, for the Toronto Plunderpalooza Festival. To reduce the exhaustion and expense of the large Mediador production I re-invented it as a duo piece, teaming up either with performance artist/musician Julie Notto or with dancer/choreographer Pam Johnson, and as such Mediador gigged frequently through bars, to barns, to living rooms, it's final performance during the 2000 Toronto Fringe Dance Festival.
In 2000 High-Xposure, a highly experimental vertical dance company (climbers meet choreographers) for whom I had been doing music and movement, was commissioned by Toronto's Theatre Centre to create a piece for the Body Geometry Festival. High-X, knowing of WURF, requested that I stage WURF with them for the festival. In November 2000 WURF (as 'spectacle') premiered. Suspended by a 60' rope with which he could swing all the way to the balconies, and controlled by manipulator's 20' off the ground, WURF scissored to his fall.
While the experience of working on WURF with High-X was something like a dream come true, it was also performed with very little rehearsal time (90% of rehearsal time was spent preparing tech) and in a highly anarchic collaborative environment. While I definitely enjoyed this I also wished for an incarnation of WURF that was much more highly focussed and which expressed more effectively the themes which it initially represented. In 2001 I dreamed up an interactive apparatus which would suspend WURF and which would use both audience participation and the output from physiological meters (EEG, EKG) placed on my own body to drive audio and light events. This would be a solo interactive electronic opera.
Very basically a person is suspended in a harness to emulate a marionette.
Strings run directly from the marionette's arms and legs, through a pulley system, to handles which are available to an audience. The audience, engaging the handles, pulling and releasing them, has direct control over the marionette.
The marionette wears a head lamp whose intensity is generated by an EEG device which measures the brain wave activity of the marionette. Low alpha activity - relaxed mental state, low eye activity - results in little or no light generated by the head lamp; high alpha activity - alertness, agitation, high eye activity - results in increasing light generated by the lamp.
Monitors measuring blood pressure and/or heart rate will be used to generate an audio signal. Low heart rate or blood pressure, suggestive of a state of relaxation, might generate a very fat, didgereedo like bass pulse. High blood pressure or heart rate, generated by agitation or high activity, would narrow the signal and also dramatically heighten it's frequency, suggesting activity, even urgency.
Pulling and releasing the handles of the marionette will trigger an audio response - fragments of field recordings of individuals discussing the nature of addiction. The audience/handle-users will also quickly recognise that each handle has a different audio response which, if sequenced correctly, will result in a coherent/symbolic phrase or audio signal. Manipulating the handles to achieve the correct sequencing/phrasing will also manipulate the puppet's limbs physically into a position where a pair of scissors are within it's reach. Achieving the correct phrase sequencing by the audience/users will bring the marionette into a position where he can utilise the scissors to cut himself free.
The puppet cuts his strings.....and falls.... The fall of the puppet out of the apparatus, out of his harness, out of his clothes, out of his skin, out of his head, is the opening movement for an entire subsequent "sonic theatre" performance.
The apparatus used in WURF is a viable installation art piece and will be treated as such. However, this installation piece can be placed on a stage and used for the opening sequence of an opera, a sonic theatre journey, into the birth and development of consciousness.
WURF is an artistic and theatrical representation and journey into the relationships of addiction and consciousness. I carried the image of 'the puppet who cut his strings' through a number of years of academic oriented study revolving around the themes of addiction and consciousness, as well as years spent living and working with street people, addicts and the mentally ill in street-oriented Catholic communities with a strong mystical underpinning. The image of WURF, dangling by a thread, strung up and strung out, suggested the plight of the addict; a person whose strings are pulled by forces outside of themselves, wooden and inanimate. And yet WURF simultaneously suggested a pre-conscious being, blissed out, pre-natal, not having entered into the hard cutting world of consciousness where decisions have to be made, will mustered and put into action. WURF became a crucial symbol, a dialogical topos, for my ongoing reflections with regard to the relationship of grace (pre- or uber-consciousness) and gravity (consciousness and addiction). The puppet seemed to be a creature of grace, its orientation was upward, it rested on the ground only to simulate humans, creatures of the earth. Heinrich Von Kleist, in his essay, 'The Puppet Theatre', made an astonishing connection between the lives of angels (blissful beings) and of puppets (manipulated beings). Both were in fact far more graceful than humans - capable of the most astonishing acrobatic feats - their movements pendular, circular, unfettered by the limits so peculiar to creatures of gravity, whose movements seem so shambolical.
And yet its only humans that can love - and love can only exist in gravity - the world of suffering and absurdity, stupidity and violence, limitation and failure and vulnerability. And this love, despite the excruciating trials of the worlds in which it lives and has its dwelling, is worth sacrificing that blissful world of grace that only the puppets and angels enjoy. In some ways WURF is very much like one of Wim Wenders angels - giving up grace because he literally "falls" in love.
WURF falls.
To the ground, out of paradise, into the Land of Nod where he must learn to crawl and stand and walk. He crashes from bliss into helplessness in a moment - and in reality these two are only a shadow apart. Which brings us back to addiction. While you have your fix, whatever it is (addiction is anything that keeps a person or a society from realising their deepest talents and purposes and aspirations) you're in a state of bliss, but it's a bliss that has no lasting power and as soon as its candle burns out you're way back out in the dark cold, somewhat worse off than before, and the face of something really terrible is emerging, and so there's a scramble for the fix which staves off that emergence, but which also seems to feed it. So bliss is really near to helplessness, and it has a relationship both to pre-consciousness and to addiction.
In Tibetan Buddhist terminology 'Bardo' refers to the place a person who has just died finds him or herself. WURF, in cutting himself free from his strings, falls into just such a place. It is a kind of "no place" where all the projects, and motives, and engines which called and drove a person are suddenly gone. It's a frightening place because everything you knew has vaporised, and really you have lost any idea of who you are at all. Traditionally this has been considered a somewhat dangerous passage because evil spirits can have considerable persuasive powers. There is a tremendous vulnerability associated with it and considerable energy, the entire Tibetan Book of the Dead, is devoted to ensuring that the person who has recently passed away doesn't become lost. WURF's fall is a fall into primary vulnerability. He is a child with no comprehension of how to live and move in a world of gravity, and so he is in great danger.
WURF, while cutting himself free from the ties that bind him, also cuts himself off from that which bound him together. That which drove him and moved him was, however manipulative and senseless, that which defined him. He has cut himself completely away from his previous identity, torn himself out of his skin, thrown himself out a window of his known home.
This is a birth of consciousness.
Pure addiction is a closed system, a self-perpetuating reel which has it's own irrefutable internal logic. Left alone it's inevitable conclusion is self-destruction. Breaking addictive chains and patterns can be precipitated by the confluence of: (1) internal transformations catalysing themselves into action; simultaneous to, (2) radical outside influences fiercely challenging the cyclical logic of the addictive drama. In the case of WURF, deeply internal physiological systems - heart rate, blood pressure and cerebral activity (all of which are used in modern medicine to measure levels of stress, a strong indicator for addictive pathology) - are orchestrated and broadcast outwards, simultaneous to a profound external intervention occurring from outside of the addictive drama, literally from off-stage. The climax, or apocalypse, of these simultaneous events results in 'the fall', and the birth of consciousness.
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