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Creation: Mythic Weavings
An installation and performance
You must give birth to your images.
They are the future waiting to be born.
Fear not the strangeness you feel.
The future must enter you long before it happens.
Just wait for the birth,
For the hour of new clarity.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Myths are condensed particles of a cultural memory—cautionary
tales, magic spells, incantations to raise the dead. They are volatile
pieces of a larger puzzle, human riddles we return to.
- Naomi Iizuka |
Our relationship to myth is visceral, potent, and immediate. Creation
myths in particular allow us to access our most elemental cultural ideas
of the world around us, and our place within it. As they are handed down
from generation to generation, the retelling of these myths presents
the opportunity to honor the past and to compose the future. All cultures
possess a need to articulate the act of creation and to answer the question: “Where
do we come from?” Using the metaphor of weaving, we explore creation
and its meaning. Weaving is an act of creation and inclusion. The materials
of weaving are visceral, possessing weight and presence. Weaving makes
order out of chaos, marks time, while forms dynamically build. Weaving
is physical, making the invisible act of creation visible.
We are faced with very important moral and ethical questions on the
nature of creation in our world today. We now have the power and the
ability to create whole new worlds. But should we? What mistakes have
we made? What lessons have been learned? Are there any mythological road
maps? At the dawn of this new millennium, when there is tremendous potential
to destroy our world or create new ones, we believe that it is essential
to examine our myths of creation. Creation: Mythic Weavings creates a
dialogue and provides the opportunity to bear witness to creation, and
to compose our future together in a tangible form. |
Images from Creation: Mythic Weavings
Click on the thumbnail to see the larger image
  
  
 
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Participatory Creative Process
Our audiences are integral to the creation of an essential component of this
on-going project. We invite you to collaborate in the writing of a new creation
myth. During the performance, each individual is offered a strip of muslin,
a fine cotton cloth of plain weave, upon which to write or draw. These strips
of muslin are collected and subsequently woven together into a continuous
piece of cloth. Contributions, in the form of a weaving, give birth to an
element of installation. Through participation and interaction, a continuum
of response is nurtured and shared and a dialogue is born.
Installation and Performance
A weaver, sitting at her loom, continuously weaves a new creation myth, using
the authored strips of muslin gathered from our audience. Grandmothers of the
Light emerges as a dance and chant—wrinkling, rippling and unfolding.
Genesis is a compilation of selected text taken from interviews with members
of the community, spoken in mask. The actions of preparing to weave—unraveling,
unknotting, pulling apart, making thread, winding, unwinding, ripping are performed
simultaneously as the story of Genesis is remembered and recounted. Cry of
the Benu Bird explores light and dark, chaos and order. Embracing the absurd,
Cupeno tells a simple, entertaining myth of creation. The Hungry Woman incorporates
earth and water in the action of planting, merging the earthly with the spiritual.
Celebrating the clown, The Big Bang explodes the creation myth of science.
In a small-scale intimate installation, simple wooden handlooms frame writings,
which combine and interweave conversations with each of the artists. These
biographical pieces illuminate the intersection of the personal and the creative
act. By combining both textual and textural elements, the boundaries between
writing and display are explored as the private act of reading is extended
into the public domain. The story of The Rainbow Serpent is heard, as a large
labyrinth is unfolded in space with thick, twisted bundles of muslin forming
massive braids. Cairns of layered, dense balls of fabric and yarn and piles
and mountains of strips of muslin, ranging from small to giant in size, mark
a sacred journey. Layers of cloth transform into a landscape. These are the
materials of weaving, accessible and familiar, revealing the potential for
the witness becoming creator. |
Created and performed by The Gypsy Mamas
Laura Lanfranchi
Elaine Vaan Hogue
Christina Bechstein
Susan Main
Pamela Mills
Nina Pleasants
With
Hiroko Kikuchi
Lacey Langston
Susan Oppie
Sound Design
Drew Levy
Premiered at the 6th Annual Women On Top Festival
Boston Playwright’s Theatre
March 2002
Boston, Massachusetts |
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