Collaborating: long-distance or with the deceased

One hurtle that must be faced early in making Mysteriam is trust in the confluence of separate events. The idea that things that happen at different times or in different places can be of a piece, that if we refrain from forcing and monitoring, events will coincide of their own accord. One way to demonstrate this is collaborating long-distance, which we've done in past years with dance companies in Colorado and Mexico.

Generating one media to be presented alongside another media that you have only had fragmented glimpses of is certainly a challenge, and a risk, but it seems that if the two disparate streams are made from the same seed ideas, and in the same spirit, they always marry beautifully when put together.

A more exotic option is to work with someone who died before you were born. GlassMask Nos. 1-5 (see No.2 below) is a series of short video artworks that traces the rise and fall of a tiny metal action figure with a marble head, through the rearrangement of a lecture of the Rev. James A. Pike, Episcopal Bishop of California until 1966. Before I began researching his fascinating life, I had used his voice in the music for No.1, which was made in 2002, and is taken from his introduction of Vince Guaraldi at Grace Cathedral in 1965. A minister friend of ours related that Pike had died wandering the desert outside Jerusalem, and had led a famously influential and perverse life prior to that; I was hooked, and began reading his biography.

The only other speech to be found on the Web is here, "Today's Crisis in Religion," a speech at Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at UC Santa Barbara, Nov. 7, 1966. I proceeded to select the strangest parts of his lecture, transcribe them, rearrange them into a script, and put the recordings in their new order, which told a very weird story of the excitement and disillusionment of a philosopher. I did not know this was going to be the story before Pike revealed it, honestly. It was there, perfectly clear in the phrases of his 40-minute lecture. What makes this possible, I think, is that whenever we say anything, we give ourselves away-- Pike himself had followed this exact path of rise and fall in his life, and by the time he composed and delivered this speech, his son had committed suicide and Pike had begun holding seances to reach him, and the Rev. died in the desert, lost and overheated, three years later.

We listen for what is being murmured at us by the universe, we look at the materials at hand, and trust that everything we need in order to play and make art is already there. To find out more about Pike, go here.
Watch the result of this collaborative process in GlassMask No.2, below.