between the worlds
This performance is a dreamscape woven through music, poetry and dance, an invitation to step out of the hyperactivity of everyday mind into stillness. It takes the audience on a meditative journey into a space where reality is no longer concrete but has many subtle layers. Here the endless narrative of the brain can rest. Perceptions arise at the edge of awareness. As in lucid dreaming the luminous body can find its freedom from the physical body and move through space and time. When you put down the book of the story of your life you become the reader instead of the hero. This is the meeting with the mythical timeless self which underlies all shamanic initiations.
The path of the seer and of the visionary is to recognize that the world is a dream and that we can dream it into being. - Alberto Villoldo ‘Shaman, Healer, Sage’
This journey is not for everyone. The mind gets insecure the moment it suspects that there may be more to reality than it can rationally explain. Its first reaction is restlessness and boredom. It wants its fix of distraction: adrenalin or entertainment. Empty space creates fear. The bubble of security may burst. This show is a provocation and catharsis for the ’consensus trance’ of everyday mind. The shaman says: Emptiness is not empty. Go deeper, watch the space between words, behind sounds, between objects, between the worlds. Here beyond the threshold of boredom, when all expectations rest, you may glimpse infinity... magic happens in the mind of the beholder.
Many thanks to: Philip Wells for permission to use his poem ‘Awake’, to Candida Valentino, Luzmira Zerpa and Colin Carr for musical contributions, to Raphael Mouterde for recording and producing the music.
Performed at Diverse Attractions, Edinburgh Fringe 2007
Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live.
- Albert Einstein
The story-book of a lifetime's experience melts into silence. Yet the storyteller is still present. What happens when the protagonist is gone? We enter limbo, the space between worlds. The storyteller looks into the mirror of emptiness wide-eyed.
Memories are stirred within the body. Other selves inhabit this twilight world between mind and feelings, the known and the unknown, between the old which no longer exists and the new not yet fully born. Fragments combine into new perspectives like an unfamiliar face on a familiar person. When you yield to the confusion and disorientation you may start to forget who you are... or is it a remembering?
This show explores forgetting and remembering what we are taught to forget. It explores a kind of knowing which is not rational, a seeing which is not merely with the eyes, and feeling which is not limited to personal sentiment but is an awakening of multi-leveled perception.
Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live. The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. The world we have created is a product of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.
- Albert Einstein