Proposal to the Globe Theatre: Oct. 22, 2010

k a l e i d o c y c l e

(Greek: KALOS beautiful + EIDOS form + KUKLOS cycle, circle)

a response to the call for submissions for Globe Theatre's 2011-12 Shumiatcher Sandbox Series

On the evening of July 15, 2010, I was at an opening reception at Mysteria Gallery in Regina when the bottom dropped out of everything and I found myself simultaneously inhabiting two realities: I was flying around and around the gallery like Superman, and at the same time standing still, looking at a painting. The multiple and entirely unexpected seizures I had over the next ten hours dramatically changed my life, sense of identity, and perspective on everything. Several things happened immediately:

• the first response of my brain was to close down my speech centre; I immediately lost the ability to speak for hours at a time; at some point however I realized that I could still use rudimentary American Sign Language (ASL), through which I could communicate through an interpreter until I more or less regained fluency in spoken English 
• finding it difficult to sleep for over two months, I often slipped instead into the Regina summer nights on timeless bicycle rides until dawn brought the dog walkers and joggers and an end to the magic and secrets of the black streets
• I found myself encountering a changed world, overwhelmingly beautiful and surreal, visceral and intense on every level, and I saw clearly the intrinsic interconnectedness of everything
• I lost a familiar connection with time, and was not only unable to hold onto moments as they passed beyond memory within a minute or two, but found myself unable to anticipate or plan or build; even a simple task such as making coffee was incalculably difficult and required all of my attention to complete.

Eventually I was diagnosed with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (an affliction of many artists and writers, including Dostoyevsky and Lewis Carroll, TLE for short), a condition that rarely brings on externally discernable seizures but which often induces deeply personal experiences of the divine, and obsessive bursts of creativity and energy. The question naturally arises whether the seizures create hallucinations of divine or ecstatic experience (in short, a form of madness), or whether encountering the sacred in the physical world manifests as a medical anomaly categorized as seizures, but which in fact may be a normal human response to a profound spiritual experience. Time is passing and I am ‘healing.’ With a sense of sad loss, I am slowly returning to a state of capability that includes teaching at the university, writing grant applications, driving a car, making plans, and working on creative projects. However, it is becoming apparent that the seizures have left or created a crack through which I can still extend myself to touch that exquisite and mysterious world that seems to co-exist with my daily reality. In fact as I learn to incorporate the existence of this portal into my life in general, the schism created socially between others and me is much greater than any break inside my own psyche; I have been labeled ‘manic,’ ‘dead,’ ‘permanently altered,’ ‘subtly different,’ and ‘an entirely different person.’ Because my experience of the world was so radically changed, for some time I had a sneaking suspicion that I had actually died in the gallery and was wandering in some portal between worlds.

KaleidoCyle is partially a response to and engagement with this experience, as well as on current clinical and philosophical engagements with TLE, but I am also interested in the moments of 'divine inspiration' experienced by other artists, particularly the collaborators on this project, with their many different backgrounds. The production would rely heavily on the development process, signaling a return to my early performance/ensemble experiments based on the work of the Odin Theatre under Eugenio Barba, exploratory work I conducted for over a decade starting in 1984. Drawing on this and other related work such as that of Anne Bogart and the SITI group, as well as the stage craft of early Julie Taymor projects, I hope to conduct a Lab with an interdisciplinary group of Saskatchewan-based artists, working collaboratively over several months to create a performance piece based on the above subjects.

Although a good deal of the meat of the project will be based on material generated through the lab process, the production will largely rely on non-verbal, non-textual communication, with an emphasis on images, bodies, sounds and music. Definite and intrinsic elements of the finished work include a bicycle being ridden onstage, live music and foley/sound effects, live performance-projection of film footage, a small ensemble of physical performers, intricate and lovely costume designs, and some form of ASL Poetry (a performative style of signing developed within the Deaf community that spans dance, poetry, storytelling, and ASL - here's an example). Other elements might include harness /suspension performance, puppetry and/or mask work, and live painting or the live creation of visual art. There will be some element of the surreal juxtaposed with a representation of waking life, ideally recreating for the viewer some representation of the experience of a TLE event and fallout, or a brush with the muses.

I envision the playing space as being very simple, with perhaps nothing more than a few modular, moveable set pieces, such as lightweight screens to act as rear- and front-projection and/or shadow-puppet surfaces, so other than the costumes and a few interesting props, such as the bike, puppets, and potential suspension systems, the actual cost to mount the show would be relatively minimal. However, it would be important to me to pay the collaborators for both the development phase and the production.