SOPHIA

This page is meant to provide information about this forthcoming piece for artists and potential collaborators. Please be discreet about sharing this page . Thanks.

This piece is performed by one vocalist (singer/actor) accompanied by live and recorded music. It tells the story of a woman who has experienced mystic visions her entire life. These visions leave her disoriented and unable to connect with other people. She finds someone who she thinks connects with her, a spiritual guru who seems to understand her, only to be devastated when she finds out he is a fraud who was only using her for sex. As he sleeps beside her in bed, she experiences an ecstatic vision of the oneness of the universe, a vision wherein she can right all the mistakes and flaws of the cosmos in a moment of purifying fire.

The text consists of a mix of spoken word, song, and chant. I am looking for a vocalist with acting skills and a background in experimental vocal technique, who is able to develop the final form of her performance in collaboration based on the text below.

My intention with this piece is to create a public ritual that invites the audience into a shared experience. An experience that can help us, as a community, process our complex feelings of isolation and longing and fear, and the need for connection in the difficult times we face. I am looking for a performer who is open to explore depths of emotion and authenticity, and to be a focal point for this public expression of grief and rage and ecstatic hope.

I am also looking for a performance venue that is conducive to softening the division between audience and performer. My work tends to be site-specific, so the final staging will be dependent on the particular design of the performance space.

Here is a draft of the full score:

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Here is a draft of the text, with accompanying score for each section.

PRELUDE

This is how I feel.

I look at my hands, and they don’t seem like my hands.

My hands.  My hands.

This is how I feel.

I look through my eyes, and it’s like I’m watching someone else’s life.

Not mine. Not mine.

This is how I feel.

Can you help me?

Can you understand?  

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Is this your hand? 

Is this your hand? 

I see you, hurt, in pain.

You reach out.

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I DO NOT BELONG HERE.  I’M FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE.  AN ALIEN DIMENSION .

My parents were alien, they gave birth to me, and stranded me here.

There!  There it is!   I see a glimpse, too fast, too fast, to even savor or remember, but it is there.

I do not belong here in this insanity of puppets.

DOES EVERYBODY FEEL THIS WAY?

Here is my hand

Here is my hand

 hurt, in pain.

I reach out

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INTERLUDES

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MEMORIES OF THINGS

The pull of my mother’s hand, the day that car nearly hit me.   it was over before I knew what happened.

My recurring dream of the pizza robot aliens.

The heat of the sun that August afternoon.

The heat that August afternoon.

There were three of them, three women, one of the women was taller than the other two.   she had dirty brown hair, cut not too long ago.  The other had a look in her eye like she was pissed at everyone, but she took it out on herself. 

The third one didn’t look like she belonged with the other two. Her eyes dreamed of someplace else.

Or was it the tall one who had the angry look in her eye?  No, no it was the short one.  

It was a rainy day, there was a break in the rain, the ground was wet, everyone was miserable,  there was a droopy feeling to everything,  I was on the other side of the street, the collar of my coat was damp against my neck.  My right boot was tight against my little toe.

There was one other time I saw him, it was the only time that he really looked happy.  That would be a good memory to hold on to.  He was standing at the kitchen table. Did I ever see him again?

He fingers brushed against the back of my neck, I felt a  thrill in my stomach when they lingered a little longer than I expected.  I knew I would never kiss him. 

The bottle were dusty, and arranged on the shelf in descending order. there were nine of them.  

The entire city street split in half, like a photograph being ripped in two, there was  a blinding light behind it, burning me, burning me away

I am slipping I am trying to hold on, to hold on, to hold on to just one thing, just one thing to hold me here

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HISTORIES/INTERLUDES

And so I lived, becoming ever more disconnected from the world around me.  Time seemed to elide and lengthen, stretching and contracting.  I was 30 years old, then I was 19, then I was seven. 

And the things I remembered happened like I was reading a script, like I was a puppet, like I had no choice, carried along by a current.

But the scariest thing were the moments when I seemed to be outside that relentless current of my life, when I stood outside of the world in a place where real choice was possible.  

This was a place I can’t describe,  a place of fire and monsters and angels.  A place where people came to me but I was not me, or I was not only me, in the fire and the chaos and the swirling light.  

When I left that place and returned here (to the puppet life), I began to suspect that my memories of that other place weren’t accurate.  What seemed like memories were simply an imprint in my neurons of an event my biological brain couldn’t really apprehend, something it wasn’t equipped to sense or respond to, the way the fossil of a dinosaur footprint is only a faint echo of the monstrous beast that left it.  No, that’s not right, since there’s still some connection in that footprint to the shape and size of the living beast that left it.  This was more the way the inexorable pounding of that great foot could splash all of the water out of a shallow puddle.  Yes, there was evidence that something had passed, but the effect left behind was so far removed from the beast as to render the actual event mysterious, inscrutable, lost, but the effect was still utter, profound.

Yes, this is my life.  

How can I convey a sense of that to you here and now?  

Is it impossible?  

Or am I just being full of myself to think that this isn’t just the ordinary experience of every living being on this planet?  Something special and mysterious, yes, but a specialness that we all share, and when you hear my story your response will be a shrug, yes, we feel that too, we’ve always felt it.  Your parents felt it, and your children will feel it, you will say.  Some people name it to defuse the terror, but it’s not God, you will say.  It’s not Karma.  It’s not heaven, it’s not hell, it’s not consciousness.  It is the prison and the ecstasy of 

Existence

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Images of a woman wearing the mask of a bird.  It all comes down to this. A moment in time.  A moment to observe, to just observe.  

Who is this woman?  Does she speak in this moment of frozen time?  Time frozen, a deep stillness.  A fiery energy that both expands and contracts at the same time so that the stillness is an illusion.  It’s always an illusion.  An illusion we can’t get out of, yet she did somehow.   Somehow.  And I think it made her crazy.  Insane, lost to us.  Did she seek help from a charlatan?  Did she lead him into madness too?  Sweep her along with him?

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When I reach out my hand to you, can you touch me 

and in that connection bring that other place to a blazing fire of freedom here and now and forever 

Here and now and forever in that blink-of-an-eye contact of our skin?

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CHANTS

I met him at a retreat in the New Mexico desert.  

I thought he was some kind of teacher.  

He spoke to us about how this world is only illusion, how we are all of us beings of light, and how deep down we all partake in a larger reality.  I thought he understood what it was like not to really belong, to be half of you someplace else all the time.  

He spoke to us of mystical visions, of our connection to the universe, the unity of all things, the illusion of ego, the eternal belonging, how we are all lost and looking for home.

He was beautiful.  He was inspiring.

I thought he could help pull me back.

But …

When he looked in my eyes, he saw something that frightened him. 

I frightened him.

God, you are such a fraud!

I wasn’t anything special to you, just another fuck, someone you thought you could fool.  When you saw you couldn’t, when you saw something real, you moved on.  I hate you!

And so they danced.  He would have to be a better person.  He would have to go back in time and recreate himself.  Do all the hard work he hadn’t done, that he had put off for another day, but now he knew he would have to have done it before he met her.  Or she would destroy him.  But only SHE knew how to do that.  He needed her help before she could help him without destroying him.  And so they’re caught in an endless loop, a cycle that neither can get out of because she needed him too.  She needed someone to hold her here.  In this world, in this now, just for one instant.  One moment of really being here and nowhere else.  One moment like that would save her and she needed him to be better.  She needed to make him better so he could be that person.

I whisper in his ear.  I whisper the things I’m seeing, the things I’m doing, and it takes me back further, further, further, further, further, further, until I see a lonely child and parents who did not love.  Is that all this comes down to?  Parents who were being mean?  It can’t be that simple, can it?  I can make those parents nice to him and he becomes a good man?  

But how do I make that them good without making their parents good, and their parent’s parents and their great grandparents all the way back to the beginning of the bloodline, all the way back to the beginning of the species.  All the way back to the beginning of time.  Back to the Big Bang.  Is that where something went wrong?  Was there a fundamental flaw right there when the universe began and everything after that was just broken puppets acting out their parts?  Can I fix that?  Something fundamentally wrong right there at the beginning of time?

Fuck that!  Fuck that!  Fuck that! I want to escape this cycle of puppets and get back to that realm of freedom.  I know it exists.  I saw it.  I felt it.  I know that feeling was real. 

Fuck that!  Fuck that!  Fuck that! I want to escape.  I saw it.  I felt it.   

Fuck that!  Fuck that!  Fuck that! 

Outside time, because time is a trap.

Outside meat and bones, because there’s no free will there

Outside of desire, because desire is compulsion.

Outside of light and dark, because yin and yang is a dance in lock step to the laws of physics.

OUTSIDE IS FIRE BURNING AND FREE

OUTSIDE I AM FIRE BLAZING

UNMADE

UNREPENTANT

BURNING WHERE I WILL

BURNING WHERE I MUST

I AM THERE NOW.  DO YOU SEE ME?

I touch you and I move you because you are the puppet and I am the fire

I burn though all time and space cleansing the mistakes

burning away the dark

Healing the pain of childhoods long gone and gone and gone and gone

of your father and your mother, and your grandparents and your great grandparents, all the way back to the beginning of time

I burn through them all and you can join me here because here there is only the fire and I am the fire you are the fire

HERE WE ARE FREE

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I am quiet now whispering into his ear as he sleeps thing things I have seen.

Your parents were kind to you  they taught you in love to see, unclouded, crystalline, true

They taught you in love to 

love fully

selflessly

unbroken

free

Can you open your eyes and be free?

A puppet still, but a puppet moved by fire, a TRUE vessel of the fire, an unbroken vessel.

Love Me

Heal my Vessel

the way my fire healed you