The State of Magick/The Magickal State 23/24 May 2014

Leicester DMU

Curated and Convened by Nick Kilby

Co-Chairperson Rachel Parry

Thanks and ongoing gratitude:

A by no means exhaustive list, but the journey to the conference would have been infinitely more trying were it not for all the speakers and artists here with us today, my soul spiral Holly Johnson, mentor/supervisor and academic oracle Helena Goldwater, Leila Galloway, Alissa Clarke, my aktion mothers Llewyn and Lisa (2 Gyrlz), Luke Twyman, Adam Denton, blood pact and performing kompadre Kris Canavan, the underground troubadour Frankie Knuckles, Natalie Raven, David Clarkson and special thanks to Tom Morgan for hosting some of our international artists here in Leicester.

Do what thou wilt shall be thee whole ov thee law.

Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

We just got back from Walt Disney Land.

23rd of May Schedule- Conference

09.30-10.15 Registration

10.15-10.30 Opening Remarks

10.30- 11.45 Session One

• Dr. Lisa Newman

• Dr. Matthew Cheeseman

• The Reverend Nemu

11.45-12.15 Refreshment Break

12.15- 13.00 Session Two

• Dr. William Redwood

• Sara Zaltash

13.00-13.45 Lunch Break

13.45- 15.00 Session Three

• George Rogers

• Sharron Krauss

• MAS Productions

15.00-15.10 Refreshment Break

15.10-15.50 Round table discussion/Closing remarks

Success and failure, minerals, knowledge and illness

By

Dr. Matthew Cheeseman

This paper is a biographical account of an eighteen month period of research beginning in early Spring 2005 and ending in summer 2006. It describes a dramatic attack on my priorities as a researcher and my attempts via improvised ritual to regain control of them. In discussing the attack and ritual it considers ethnographic methodologies in researching and working with magical knowledge.

Bio

I work between English Literature, Folklore, Creative Writing, Music and Education. Recently, I’ve focused on integrating artistic practice with interdisciplinary research. I’m a member of the Centrefor Medical Humanities and the Centre for Visual Studies.

Full details of Matthew’s academic history and current research concerns can be found using the following link:

https://www.shef.ac.uk/english/people/cheeseman

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Howling Poetic

By

The Reverend Nemu

Angel of the library

Genie of the pen

Write the demon on the page

And cross him out again

“Magick is an example of Mythopoeia in that particular form called Disease of Language” Aleister Crowley

Mythopoeia, or the making of myths, plugs the magician into a stream of narrative, and the results we can look forward to depend on the poetry of the myth we are writing.In its dreams, visions and urges, the unconscious communicates in the language of poetry. We call out to our gods and familiars, and the world around us answers with rhyme. Synchronicity falls in perfect metre if we stress the right syllables, and even our failures have their own peculiar rhyme scheme.

My talk is about magick and writing. My own book began suddenly as a series of manic nocturnal emissions, frantically scribbled down over two years in the small hours of the night. I had no intention to write a book, and this material lay completely unusable until a friend asked me to read her some, and decided she should help me organize it into something coherent. The next phase took another three years, researching leads and working through ideas, drawing it apart,

putting it back together until I had an enormous string of code over a million characters long.

Solve et coagula, dissolve and precipitate, remake, rework and repeat. The editing phase took several more years, including a stint in the Amazon, and by that time the book had grown to include an attack on pharmacological medicine and the disempowering colonialism of the body which underpins it.

The entire enterprise had been attended by coincidence and poetry, mad street people illuminating chapters with timely rants, the angel of the library dropping texts in my path, characters appearing to make cameos. As if by magick, I contracted an aggressive and potentially disfiguring bacterial infection in the Amazon, allowing me to test my theories on disease and the power of will at exactly the right time. After eight magickal and terrifying months treating it with ayahuasca and ritual, I emerged lighter by ten kilos and an ex-wife, and entirely renewed.

I only realized many years later that the illness and other troubles had the signature of a particulardemon of the Goetia, when a Solomonic magickian read my cards and pulled his sigil from the deck. The obstacles, in retrospect, were stepping stones, and the poetry is much more potent on his account.

Grammar guides the words and glues the bars into the cage

Written rite, a grimoire bends the bars and frees the mage

Bio

The Reverend Nemu incarnated one night in Japan into the body of an English teacher, with a background in the History and Philosophy of Science and an interest in psychedelics.The earthbound medium and the astral clergyman share an interest in why people follow the narratives they do, and what is possible when we start exploring more weird and wonderful rhymeschemes.

The two get on well enough, but one can be something of a pedant, and the other is prone to flights of fancy.

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The Magic of Place

By

Sharron Kraus

This paper is an exploration of my relationship with a particular place – Mid Wales – and the music it inspired. At the same time it’s an exploration of something much more general and wide-reaching: what happens to us when we’re affected profoundly and inspired by a place. By looking at the different factors that make Mid Wales so rich and inspiring to me, and the creative process involved in drawing out music from the landscape, I develop a theory about (magickal) reality – about what makes our experiences of certain places and things charged, rich and ‘hypperreal’.

Bio

Sharron Kraus is a musician and composer inspired by folk music, psychedelia, horror soundtracksas well as surrealism, gothic literature and magick. She has worked musically in ritual contexts and in free improvisational ones and found interesting crossovers. Her most recent album was recorded over a period of three years spent in rural Mid Wales, listening to the landscape, workingwith it magickally and drawing out the music it seemed to contain. She is currently working on an album of songs inspired by the Mabinogion.

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Ritual as Performance/Performing Ritual

By

Lisa Newman

The aim of this talk will be to identify and discuss differences in the process, intention, and execution of performing ritual versus ritual as performance. By this, I refer to directly performing or enacting a ritual in comparison to creating a public performative action which incorporates or includes elements of ritual. One, I believe, alludes to ritual using theatrical elements in order to provide an illustration using metaphor, whereas the presumed goal of performing ritual would be to use action to invoke a magical-spiritual transformation. I do not mean to imply that one approach is more authentic or effective than the other, but instead want to identify how intention and focus can be used to better direct the desired outcome of the ritual/performance for all participants.

As a case study, I will use the example of Ron Athey’s performance “Gifts of the Spirit: Automatic Writing”. Building on his own childhood experience of glossolalia within the Pentacostal religion, Athey designed this piece in order to explore whether an ecstatic experience could be created in a secular environment. I was involved with the presentation of this performance in Manchester, 2011 and Birmingham, 2012 as a curator/stage manager. Within this discussion, I would like to share the differences that I observed between these two presentations as a lead-in to opening a dialogue related to ritual/performance.

Bio

Lisa Newman is an intermedia performance artist and co-director/ founder of 2 Gyrlz Performative Arts, an artist-led presenting organization. She received a BS in Fine Art from the University of Oregon in 1996, and an MA in Performance and Cultural Location in Contemporary Europe from Dartington College of Art in Devon, UK in 2007. Newman completed a PhD in Drama/Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester in 2014. Her current research explores the economic and social value of the body in performance and live art within contemporary art markets.

In both her solo work and in collaboration with partner, Llewyn Máire, as the gyrl grip, Newman explores the intricacies of obsession, fetish, and the loving relationship. She endeavors to challenge the “audience/performer” dynamic, with the goal of these roles become vague,

malleable; participants are encouraged to give and receive through reciprocal openings of the selfto others through live interactions.

Newman has performed in festivals, residencies, and conferences throughout North America and Europe since 1995 including the Full Nelson festival (Los Angeles), the La-bás festival(Finland), Harta Monza festival (Italy), Performance Studies Intl. conferences (Rhode Island, Copenhagen, Utrecht), Rdece Zore festival (Slovenia), Five Holes festival (Canada), and numerous others.

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Spiral Bound

By

William Redwood

Originally a PhD thesis, Spiral Bound is now being reworked as a monograph and this presentation surveys the main argument with some additional material. The idea is to elucidate linkages between physical space, occult identity and occult cosmology.

We begin with a straightforward set of observations on idioms of verticality and laterality which link esoteric identity with place in a way which is familiar from both popular culture and Christian thought: left-hand and lower-down spaces are associated with ‘black’ magic while the ‘white’ magic of the right-hand path is devoted to exploring more celestial spaces. This is important because it goes a long way to explaining both the problematic relationships between occulture and the ‘mainstream’ and also some of the problematic relationships within the occult ‘community’ itself.

We then move on to observations about the protean nature of the contemporary. It is argued that with its many and various fluxing “energies”, the esoteric universe is reflective of a contemporary experience of existential ephemerality. It may therefore be rather less resistant or radical than some thinkers have claimed. The final segment of the presentation looks at the symbol of the spiral to which so many different occult groups relate. The possible meanings it holds are exploredin relation to modernity. It is suggested that far from being atavistic or an eccentric outgrowth, esoteric thought may owe far more to the contemporary than either its proponents or detractors would care to admit. The occult, it is concluded, can only be fully understood by reference to its spatial symbolism and like much ‘alternative spirituality’, it is not just in the present but very muchof the present.

Bio

William Redwood completed a PhD on esoteric cosmology in the Anthropology Department at UCL. He writes and teaches in London.

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George Rogers

George will be speaking about his music with a focus on his current project, Vé - an Old Norse word denoting sacred space, which has been described as a ‘triptych of cosmic awe’. A ritual sound piece to take us into magickal consciousness, free from constraints of mundane thought processes.

Whether it is pushing technologies to their limits, with deep explorations of sound synthesis at

the cutting edge of software programming, or group singing pieces using Old Norse runic formulas, George states that his music, like his visual art is functional and has been designed with this concept as a core idea in the production process. A combination of artistic practice and applied science to produce magickal effects.

George’s current project utilises brutal minimalism and a raw, monochrome psychedelia, to createtransportive works which guide us into ecstatic consciousness, and new creative spaces and visions, for inspiration and healing. Blending the celestial and the aquatic, he provides paths for the listener to access their own sacred inner space, to where the voice of the fire can be heard.

Biography

George Rogers is a multidisciplinary artist whose work includes painting, digital video and electronic music production. His current sound palette ranges from electro-acoustic and vocal work, to the electronic timbres of modular synthesis. With a sonic aesthetic carved from his sources of inspiration and interests in landscape and the spirit of place, psychonautic experience, deep-listening and meditative practices, magick and gardening. George creates visceral body music which speaks directly to our modalities, exploring the creation of extraordinary changes of state in the viewer.

He graduated in 2002 with a BA Hons in Sonic Art and since then has maintained a prolific output of live performance, releases on record labels Sirenwire and En’tracte, installations, and collaborations with artists internationally.

George Rogers lives and works in Sheffield, British Isles

More information can be found here:

http://www.arkstudio23.co.uk

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Sink or Sing: A New Aesthetic of Divination, and the summer I became a digital witch.

By

Sara Zaltash

Last summer I undertook Sink or Sing, a one-hundred day live art action that culminated in my swimming to Bestival on the Isle of Wight whilst singing a one-hundred verse ballad in two languages. Fuelled by insights into the intangible connections between ancient divination practices and the collapse of space and time enacted through social media, my concern was with the supposed impossibility of changing fate and the emerging possibilities of reading fate through the digital landscape.

Crafting one hundred days as clusters of fractal rituals, every day from 1st June – 8th September I worked in different ways to swim to Bestival while singing. I transformed my life and work, trained my body, moved and witnessed movement, and wrote a long, long song. Drenched in

colour magick, dosed up with herbs, and poetically guided by the philosophies of Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will, François Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy and Maurice Blanchot’s collected writings,I created a metaphysical framework by which to live as artwork.

My ritual was inter-acted using Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Vine, other websites and hundreds of email exchanges. Writing, poetry, video, audio, photography and found objects endure through the transformations that occurred during those one hundred days. The press got involved; some of the world looked on. My presentation contextualizes these materials as transgressive and livingmagick, conducted by a novice diviner always-already becoming a digital witch.

Bio

Sara Zaltash (BA Theatre, Film and Television, Bristol; MA Performance, Culture Context, Leeds) reveals transgression by exploring duration through song, poetics and action. Music, philosophy, consciousness and digital life influence her work. She uses recorded sound, singing and musicalityto craft autobiographical live action as contemporary myth, as urban parable, as lost legend. Using site-responsive devising methods, the tangible materials of her work are gleaned from her surroundings. Sharing her experiences of life, love, adventure and failure, she performs herself becoming a hero and privileges the nomadic voice. Out of popular movements, digital lives and ancient practices, Sara Zaltash seeks frontiers, pioneers and revolutions.

http://sarazaltash.com/

MAS Productions- Artists Talk

24th May Schedule- Performance Symposium

PACE Building

Doors from 10.30am

11.15 - Robert Hardaker

12.00 – Sara Zaltash

12.45 – Charlotte Rodgers

13.30 – MAS Productions

14.00 – Allison Halter

14.30 – Anna Natt

15.00 – Tom Morgan

16.00 - Orryelle, Allis Maun and Sha

Please note: Some performances are durational in nature and may share the same space as other performances.

Flash photography is not permitted within the performance spaces at any time. The images of the work created are distributed at the discretion and approval of the artist and cannot be reproduced without prior consent.

Allison Halter

A Love Offering

A Love Offering functions as a psychic kissing booth in which audience members make a donation/”love offering” in exchange for a sensual, non-physical, energetic exchange.

Bio

I am a conceptual artist interested in systems of power, in the acquisition and abdication of control.

I seek opportunities to confront and confound audience expectations. By highlighting the daily performativity we all assume, I expose our dependency upon social matrices in our shifting personal identities. Repetitive actions hint at mysterious prior events. The viewer must extrapolate the significance of these accumulating gestures, which take on a deeper emotional charge as they slowly and inexorably pile up.

My practice exists on cusps. I believe that only in these in-betweens can we truly stop being polite and start getting real.

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Robert Hardaker

Untitled (operate:reiterate)

i. Generate an atmosphere of comfort in a disquieting scene.

ii. Tease with disjointed rhythm that oscillates in the subconscious.

iii. Curate the senses to recall collective memory; real or imagined.

iv. Contradict: strength in weakness, private made public.

v. Exercise the seemingly futile.

Bio

Robert Hardaker is an artist working in performance. Since Graduating from De Montfort University Ba(Hons) Fine Art in 2012 he has undertaken several internships with emerging art groups in Leicester such as The Attic and 2 Queens Gallery. In 2013 he performed at Circuit Festivaland for Roger Hiorns’ “Youth” at The Hepworth Gallery. He is currently curating and creating work for Handmade Festival 2014 and is developing new solo and collaborative work.

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Tom Morgan

Untitled for the Watcher

My physical performances are based on my highly ritualised training in Indian and Eastern European performative traditions, as well as Japanese martial arts, which has allowed me to develop a highly disciplined and controlled bodymind. This training, along with performance rituals, allows me to attempt to contain and maintain a sublime state of chaos, and to use this as an activator for the audience.

Central to my work is the Indian principle of the whole body; referring to the presence of both the physical body and of the yogic subtle body. The subtle body is the term given to the energies that can be channelled through the physical body in order to strengthen it and heighten its abilities, and bares a close resemblance to the forces channelled by sigal in chaos magick. In my performances I utilise my training in the Indian martial art Kalarippayattu to engage both my subtle and physical body to create a whole performing body that is capable of becoming all-eyes. A body that is all eyes can forge intimate connection with the audience member without being physically intimate and enhance the experience in the shared space between the performer and the audience. With this accentuated awareness my performances can act as a semi-spiritual experience for the audience, as both our presences in the shared space are intensified through myritualised subtle body.

This high level of discipline and ritual, that has become an integral part of my whole body, allows me to both contain and channel sublime chaos energy, without allowing it to become formless and unwatchable or allowing the energy to dissipate and become entropy. The focused performance of the channelled sublime is designed for a society in which we, as conditioned participants, have lost both our relationship with our whole bodies and with our potential sublime energies. In my performances I attempt to make my body an activator for the audience, using our shared space expose my own sublime energy to the audience member and attempt to awaken their energy, which I believe to seminally present in the human form.

Bio

Tom Morgan is an emerging experimental performer currently completing a BA at De Montfort

University. Since 2013 he has travelled to Wales, Poland and Austria to train in international performance disciplines. He has collaborated in research with the Grotowski Institute and trained

under the international acting master Phillip Zarrilli. His work has been performed at The Salon,

Leicester, and has been programmed at the Crisis Festival 2014, Arezzo.

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MAS Productions

Lady Vendredi Baadass Blood Quest

The Baadass Blood Quest applies Joseph Campbell’s Hero Quest to 1970’s exploitation film revenge narratives transforming the revenge storyline into a mythic ritual. We combine the neo-pop-shamanic performance art and semiotic symbol manipulation of Performance Artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena with the Gnostic and Gurdjieff influenced work of Polish Theatre director Jerzy Grotowski. The dance styles are from Haitain Vodou dance and contemporary street dance,

particularly Krumping, vogueing and popping.

Aspects of the working processes are modeled around Chaos Magic in particular work on the themes and techniques of possession as described by Nikki Wyrd in the Baphomet possession rituals of the IOT. Also we draw on Ramsey Dukes’ thinking around virtual reality, and how this functions as a description of the creative process particularly when put into the context of chaos theory systems of creativity.

Bio

Director: Jonathan Grieve studied Drama & Theatre Arts at University of Birmingham. He is a director, deviser, writer and musician, currently director of new music and performance project MAS Productions. Founder and artistic director of Para Active Theatre from 1994 to 2007, also founder member of experimental post-industrial band Contrastate. He has taught at universities and drama schools since 2000 including Rose Bruford, E15 Acting School, Brunel, University of Kent and Goldsmiths.

Performer and composer: Nwando Ebizie is a performance artist, musician, producer and dancer from Nigeria. She spent the early part of her career in physical theatre and circus, searching for a process that could encapsulate her ideas. This included training at Circomedia in Physical Theatre and aerial arts, performing and training with Para Active for 4 years, including performances at LIFT festival and performances with Guillermo Gomez Pena. A sudden understanding that her practice had to combine music with movement led her to compose a new score for Hotel Medea in 2009. Further study at British Academy of New Music helped her contextualise her musical ideas and now she is bringing her physical performer/live art practise together with musical creation in the persona of Lady Vendredi.

Consultant on the ritual arts: Dr Mark James Hamilton trained at the University of Birmingham (UK), and with classical Indian dancer Priya Srikumar, in Edinburgh. His doctorate was awarded bythe University of Canterbury (NZ). Mark has worked as a dancer-actor, director-choreographer, scriptwriter and creative producer for stage and television, and researches the integration of voiceand movement training. His teaching is a synthesis of the European practices of Rudolf Laban, Jerzy Grotowski and Roy Hart, with the hereditary and contemporary arts of the Māori people andthe region of Kerala. His theorising seeks to link academic discourse about performativity with practice-based examination of the formation of identity within the processes of performance practices. Over the past decade, Mark’s career in the Asia Pacific region has ranged from performance of his own solo dance works, to co-creation of a Māori pop opera with a symphony orchestra. He has convened, and continues to arrange, international gatherings through which scholars and practitioners explore the interface of the martial arts and dance drama. Dr Hamilton is an affiliate of a number of academic and artistic professional bodies. Amongst these are: Rosanna Raymond’s “Savage Klub”, Asian Performing Arts Network, Dance Base (Scottish National Centre for Dance), and The Voice Studio International (UK); New Zealand Studies Network, New Zealand South Asia Centre, and Mika Haka Foundation (NZ); CVN Kalari East Fort Thiruvananthapuram & Samudra Performing Arts (Kerala, India).

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Anna Natt

Prick

From penetration of the skin by the needle to its subsequent exit, strong sensations are awakenedin and on the body of the recipient. One can not, however, underestimate the strong sensations awakened within the viewer while observing a needle pass through skin. What the viewer perceives sensorially as they empathetically experience the feeling of being pierced is often stronger than that of the recipient. I view the ability to empathize with the sensations of another body as one type of out of body experience. As one is able to physically feel what another is experiencing, one simultaneously inhabits both the body of another and one’s own body.

The ritual quality of piercing lies in the intention of the piercer/piercee. When one considers the cleanliness and sterility essential when working subcutaneously, the constant cleaning of the skin and glove changes become ceremonial actions transformed from mundane to sacred.

Bio

Anna Natt (USA, 1975) completed her Flamenco studies at the Fundación Christina Herren de ArteFlamenco in Sevilla, Spain and furthered her studies with different teachers, most notably Israel Galvan. She is a soloist in the Swiss contemporary flamenco company “El Contrabando” and teaches at Centro Flamenco dance school in Berlin where she has been based since 2005.

Her artistic practice centers around experimenting with ways to combine Flamenco and performance art as exemplified in her pieces Tormenta and the solo piece Uro, which was first shown in the final round of the Euro-Scene Festival’s competition “Das beste deutsche Tanzsolo”. She has been researching and practicing BDSM/Conscious Kink since March 2012 when she attended her first workshop at the Schwelle 7 in Berlin.

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Charlotte Rodgers

Stripped to the Core: Animistic Art Action and Magickal Revelation.

Using visual, audio and verbal mediums I will examine more traditional magickal explorations in context of my work with blood and remnants of death in sculptural form, aiming towards personaltransformation and healing. I will also explore group productions and art events that I was involved which centred on the creation and directing of an egregore.

Using a backdrop of imagery which includes the work of Sue Fox, Gerard Hutton and Keith Theriot, and accompanied by musician/ film -maker Sean Kissling, I will examine more traditional magickal explorations in context of my work with sexuality,blood and death.

Bio

Charlotte Rodgers is an artist, writer and non denominational animist and magickian. She uses blood and remnants of death in her atavistic sculptures and as part of her transformational spiritual expression. Her books include:

‘The Bloody Sacrifice’ Mandrake of Oxford

‘P is for Prostitution: A Modern Primer’ Mandrake of Oxford

’The Sky is a Gateway Not a Ceiling: Blood, Sex, Death, Magick and Transformation’ Privately Published by Roberto Migliussi

‘A Contemporary Western Book of the Dead’ Mandrake of Oxford (a co-authored anthology with Lydia Maskell)

www.perdurabu.com/

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Orryelle, Allis Maun and Sha

as

The Well of Wyrd

The Well of Wyrd is a temporal collaboration between three Australian performers whose trips to Europe and UK in 2014 are converging. Employing sound, dance and ritual we delve into the deep mind (as represented by the Well) and draw up primal atavisms and mytho-cultural memories. Verse evoking Mnemosyne and Mymir (deities of Memory in Ancient Greek and Norse pantheons)are used in combination with trance-inducing music to delve into the DNA Well of archetypes and mythic consciousness. As Mother of Muses Mnemosyne is called to beget Inspiration, then allowing the results to ripple out into our further sonic and kinetic expressions.

The performance will be partially constructed and partially improvisational in nature. Songs and verse of Orryelle’s will be used to invoke Ihy- Ancient Egyptian God of Music and the Sistrum, son of the Goddess of Dance Hathor- and other relevant deities, then the energies and inspirations raised will unravel their own course of progression.

Bio

Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule is an esoteric artist in many media, including painting, writing, body art, sculpture, sound and performance. His ‘Tela Quadrivium’ series of alchemical art books are published by Fulgur Limited (UK) and he regularly exhibits and performs internationally. He is the director of Australian-based Metamorphic Ritual Theatre Company (http://www.crossroads.wild.net.au/morph.htm). His work engages with connecting the subconscious and conscious through employment of magical and mythical symbols and archetypes.

http://fulgur.co.uk/artists/orryelle/

Sha is a guitarist and singer who explores trance and zen lyricism

Allis Maun is a visual artist, award-winning poet and musical multi-instrumentalist who uses voice,Morin Khuur (a traditional Mongolian instrument) and percussion to channel shamanic cultural residue.

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Sara Zaltash

SEX-SEX-SEX

SEX – SEX – SEX is a new work that explores pop-song lyrics as collective social memory. Drenched in ultraviolet nostalgia, singing is radicalized in a Live Art context to make explicit and

multivalent statements about sex, sexuality and lust in relation to popular music.

“SEX-SEX-SEX is a gorgeous and disruptive performance. It’s by turns brash, seductive, angry, sorrowful, cheeky, earnest, abrasive, delicious and cathartic. Sara Zaltash holds pop culture’s ideas about love up to a harsh and difficult light: she loves loves and hates love, she sings each snippet with powerful commitment and, somehow, critical distance too. It’s a performance that burrows into your heart via your ears and then squeezes hard” – Harry Giles, artist and programmer, Summerhall, Edinburgh.

Supplementary Contributions

Due to overwhelming interest from international artists that have not been able to travel, we are pleased and extremely grateful to enclose on the following pages a piece by Wilhelm Cortez and throughout this program images of work by Shana Robbins.

Circle of Stones by Wilhelm Cortez

The Circle is cleaned,the Lost are in lead, a Bell rings.

The Lost slowly move ever super slow

The Circle is cast,a Bell rings.

The Lost journey onthrough a tight knit crowd,arrive at Circle

the edge of the Lost,the Caster brings them

Begin, celebrate,dance gathers within,the Caster is prone.

The Lost depart now,the Circle removed,none remains

Point Within Circle – Ritual Performance “As magic circles they bind and subdue the lawless powers belonging to the world of darkness and depict or create an order that transforms the chaos into a cosmos.” – Carl Jung

The use of a circle in ritual a performance is a foundation.

The performance of ritual has taken place inside a circle since time immemorial. The use of a circle in performance is ritual in its origin, as theater itself began in the round.

For myself, the use of a circle in performance begins with Lew Welch. One of the founding trio of West Coast Beats, his influence stretched far beyond his mortality. Take a look and ponder his words:

When I construct my ritual performance circle, I am not just looking for those three hundred things. I am attempting to amplify them and construct a conduit of creativity for the performer, and a conduit of intention and emotion for the Observer. This energy of “nobody understands or has ever seen” assists the performer to manifest the essence of their character. For these types of character manifestation basic elements and archetypes are utilized instead of complex theatrical ones. Fire, earth, air, water, the lost, the generator, and the responder these are just a few of the possibilities we have explored through the medium of the circle.

The manifesting nature of a carefully constructed ritual circle refines your creative energy into a sharp focus. The energy of the place greatly contributes to,and becomes a main part of, the foundational energy that the Caster uses

to connect observers to performers. There is a striking difference between the environmental energy found performing on a California beach, as opposed to ancient Serdika ruins in Bulgaria. A contemporary building lobby will lend a different current to the performance than the current of a symbolic elm tree in an ancient trade/military town square. Regardless of the environment, my stones are always there. Either orderly or chaotically placed, they will circle up and define the mix of creative and emotional energy from/of the performance space.

The stones are earth, the element of ground, and the completion of the energy cycle. A circle itself is an ever-cycling electron dance across the conductor of energy, the energy of our performance, the energy of the Observer, and the energy of our character’s intention. All this connects through the conduit of the Caster. We conduct the ritual performance in the circle to

create elemental intentions and emotions; they are transferred to the audience. Each time the circle of stones is cast, a silent performance emerges. Each performer has a clear intention focused on their elemental character. Who, where, what, and why? The body answers all, everymolecule is expressing. This is not mime or interpretive dance; this is the power of transformative ritual in action. Each performance gives the Observer a very clear perception of the actions that almost match the unspoken intention of the performer; this is empathetic performance, the power of ritual.

The Observer usually doesn’t initially know that the performance is a ritual. In fact, this unexpected factor is integral in wiping clear the Observer’s mind, so that the conduit of performance energy can be connected, and the energy can flow. The audience has either been lead from one area by the performers to the ritual area (where they only discover their participation in a ritual after it has began and they are already a part of it) or the ritual appears as if out of nowhere in a claimed space somewhere in an unsuspecting city or town.

Reactions can be varied, but with a couple of audience plants to initiate participation, answer questions, or let the authorities know that they ‘needn’t be concerned with what is happening’,all can go rather smoothly. The stew of society gets stirred up a bit, so the scum can stay mixedin and not rise to the top.

The echoes of ancients are in our DNA and genes; and the circle, the water, the fire, the candle, incense, bowl and stones are all principle players in igniting that primordial fire of performance ritual that exists inherently inside every human.

The circle of stones stays similar each time, but the performer, the conductor of the circle’s energy, evolves. When Circle of Stones was first performed, I was cloaked but still showing visible signs of humanity – face, skin, eyes. Later I added a mask and other garb to conceal all signs of fleshy humanity, much like the concept of costumed character performers at theme parks: gloves, masks, even the eyes occluded to be imperceptible from the outside. The concept for Circle of Stones has continued to evolve on its own, each re-casting of the circle is abuilding manifestation from the last, always tuning/adapting to create realness responses outside the circle.

The mask and garb add a more powerful force to enact a realness response. They change my intention, with my face concealed my body has to speak even more, my breath changes, filtered through the mask, a slight condition of oxygen deprivation for the whole show, the extra physical toll from extreme exertion of holding every muscle clenched tight for one to four hours of slow, ever so slow, movement, careful placement, and focused mind projecting intention through every pore of the body. The mask and garb distort the reality of the situationeven more. The performer/conductor is no longer in/of this world; disbelief is suspended and the fresh wonder of realness/now can emerge. But it can also back fire; I have had observers so caught in the unreality of my character that they felt compelled to attempt a physical assault. Of course, they quickly realize that all that slow careful movement can explode in a forceful burst of defensive strike. After which, anyone within eye range is certain they won’t ever attempt a similar maneuver against an ‘unreal’ masked performer again.

Circle/Mandala Relationship

Twenty-eight white stones and four black, the squaring of the circle, the growing of the mandala, the lens of ritual performance energy, the amplifier. Careful measured footsteps line

out the stones. The stones represent the ground - perhaps death, the mandala - the squaring ofthe circle - the laying down of the circle is life. The circle is the cycle, the seasons, orbits, wheels, and balls. Twenty-eight stones placed for each period in the lunar cycle. Four black stones for each season. The cycle of life, the circle becomes the burial mound; the burial mound becomes a tree’s root ball. These are the materials for casting my circle of stones.

When I cast the circle, I enact the cycle. When I enact the cycle, birth.life.death. start.end.renew intention and physicality generate kinesthetic empathy for and in the Observer. Time slows down with my slowed movement, space distorts, and reality is accepted as being somewhat malleable. This is how ritual performance can sculpt the environment, not like sand sculptures on tourist beaches, but the entire space. Participants and audience sharing this moment of slowed movement, tense anticipation that never plays out, and the echo of genetic memory can cause the loss of spatial relationship and perception of time, for a time. A moment in the moment to taste what it is to dive off the reel and into a role without a script. Natural and organic movement used for physical expression in ritual performance lends a much higher degree of credibility to the performance itself, no longer is it a technically repeated muscle memory routine. The viewing of routines like this can cause the conduit with the Observer to never connect or only partially connect. Instead, when the movements are coming from the real moment, the ‘oh shit, I am gonna fall on my ass if I continue this motion’ moment, you do not catch yourself. You fall, as your ritual character with intention, like you would fall as normal. The element of surprise sneaks in and gets the performer, the Caster as well, and this tension is relayed to the Observer who shares in it.

The morphic nature of reality is accepted at that point. We are all going to fall, so we will let ourselves enjoy the natural descent. The slower the fall, the more “nobody understands or has ever seen” is found. The circle closes on itself to a point, disappears.

The work of the ritual performance is complete.

The finality is absurd,so much time, effortcarefully constructssmall circle of stone,then meticulouslyde-con-structsame circle.

No apparentreason

.!.

Photos:

Review:http://kldancewatch.wordpress.com/2009/04/14/332/

Biography

“The Ritual we perform shows the inherent rhythms

of our daily lives.

Ancient ways of communicating with the mysterious

are visited.”G.lobal R.itual T.heater

Wilhelm Cortez discovered performance the old world way in the new world. His live performanceeducation in street theatrics took place while surrounded by a crowd of locals who frequent the central park of Guatemala City. From there, he followed an initiation by fire; literally, in his mouth,before adapting more ritual elements into his performance style. These elements are based on a survey of global contemporary and primal ritual. The fire was eventually downplayed in order to focus his performance intention on developing physical expression, which can invoke deep core genetic memory within the Observer. He lists his performance ports of call as: Guatemala, the U.S.A., China, Malaysia, Bulgaria, Macedonia and the cyber realm. He has been living a semi-nomadic global existence since 1996.

Shana Robbins

Many contemporary artists like myself are attempting to stabilize new hybrid formsof identities based on technological developments and new earth magick cosmologies that transform time, space, human identity and the repercussions of that. Modern day rituals and mythologies are an attempt to create new horizons of meaning around all of this, while still affirming and recoding former rituals. We continue to explore methods of movement and storytelling that pull from ancient narratives of birth, death, identity and transformation—in a novel co-creation withthe cultural, ecological, and social formations of our current environment.

Drawing on my experience over the past several years with shamanic ceremoniesthat link the body with the Earth and engage roles of conduit and healer, I perform durational ritualized gestures in unique landscapes and earth installations. My work is a layered conversation between experiential and visual art media-- the works on paper serving as oracular blueprints for labor-intensive installations and live and video performances in Iceland, Mexico, Costa Rica, Peru, Florida, and rural Georgia. These pieces explore the tension between meditatively slow and sensual/erotic movements—a communing with and bodying forth of natural phenomena in an ancestral dance with visible and invisible spiritual allies. We too are indigenous to the planet.