Mythologies
Reflections Collection

Shower thoughts from right after the rehearsal on the 24th:

Starting from the ability to generate and observe embodied mythic speech – to sense, and describe, and interpret, and discuss it. That holds in itself the more fundamental: Generating and observing the body as a text, a language, a matrix of signs and a sign of its own. Essentially, we are taking an idea and allowing it to infest many embodied meanings and forms, to grow and become a common-sense, to brainwash the space. Then, perhaps, the idea becomes a myth. What then motivates it? How does it relate to other mythic concepts and systems? Which already charged mythic forms did we utilize and reappropriate ourselves? How is a myth embedded in the body on the level of practice and sensation, our body’s perception of itself?

We are still far from asking how to “liberate” that body from some more Eldritch myth, one that is lurking in the little things, innocent and ominous. In other words, to invite the audience to see the stories, fictions, narratives, myths that participate in their reality, and to negotiate their place from a place of encountering reality.

Maybe that Augusto Boal “Theater of the Oppressed”, which I can see echo in comedy-nights and improvisation comedy, is an exciting entry point into thinking of a more audience participatory approach. Taking the mythologies of and from the audience as a base can help make the forms and meanings familiar, and thus aid us in making them alien – defamiliarize.

Another interpretation I see forming is that harkening to ancient myth in two ways. One, where contemporary myths are traced back through time and thus stripped to their bare essentials; also involving thoughts of how the body has been subjected to mythology through time and the practices involved. Two, aligned with thoughts of Witchcraft and Magic – or occult, orthopraxical beliefs – where the focus is on how the common-sense of the past seems foreign, so what if we examine our own as foreign to another humanity.

Hopefully, these options will gradually unfold and sort themselves out as we continue working.