Fluxus1 Releases Alternate

I have mentioned Fluxus1 as a Blogger with imagination and talent.

Now on Summer Solstice, Fluxus1 has released a stunning podcast entitled Alternate, a fusion of styles that you will find exciting, inspiring, and entertaining.

The following podcast entitled ALTERNATE is presented as a first step in unifying my interest in ambient sound and popular song. As on the LONGTIME CD, my method was recording technology. The works on this album were created in a variety of formats: 4-track cassette, 8-track analog, 16-track ADAT, 16-track analog, 24-track analog, and digital multi-track. Many of the tracks were then augmented using Logic, Audacity, and Garageband.

Thom MacFarlane

This is an outstanding effort that holds together from the first to last selection. Go to the website to print out the names of the pieces and credits. You will be glad you downloaded this podcast. The style fuses the best of past practices with new ideas. After an Entrée, Free Danny moves things along, and pieces like Mr. Memory will blow you away with its sadly nostalgic narrative blindly dancing on. There is a cameo-like appearance of A Child in A Chocolate Shop, "the victim of a cosmic joke" complete with the laughter of innocence. Little Girl is fresh and evokes such delight that you can imagine building a movie around the song. State of Mind is catchy and beautifully rendered, followed by Melt Into Your Arms, a kind of quiet confrontation, building to Gone So Long, a fatalistic remembrance of times past, rising to Dysfunctional Town, another movie-like composition fraught with climactic extremes, eventually collapsing to Pretty Little Fingers, as nice an exit as anyone can imagine. Throughout there is a significant social comment underlying the musc and lyrics. Each element of the music contributes to the commentary, couching the lyrics in an ambiguous context, and throughout there is often a sense of regret and irony.

After listening to this album, I was struck by the coherence of the album as a whole. I vaguely felt I had just heard the sound track of a new Charlie Kaufman film, and thinking "How did I miss that?"

Great work guys! Kudos, Thom!

Summer Solstice and the Passage of Naomi

Solstice means "sun stands still," defining a moment of change, and so summer solstice celebrates the moment of entering the fullness of summer, a pause in our passage to a new era, which despite our names and sense of cycles has never been and will not be again. Such passage is unique.

Through the portal of my awareness, Naomi was always present as a distant recognition of a time gone by when she was just beginning to recognize the journey she would take to remote and unexpected adventures. The images of her youth and energy that echo in my memory of times in the past were restored relatively recently as somehow we reconnected through the fabric of cyberspace. I picked up the threads of her journey as she became aware that there were new regions of experience awaiting her, a deeper fulfillment of an expedition begun long ago. Our messages began and continue in a natural and unforced exchange, as though we are on the crest of a dynamic expansive wave cycle whose frequencies are measured in decades rather than seconds. After decades of absence, our worlds coincided once again, revived by these new communal powers of the Internet.

On this day of summer solstice, our orbits brought us face to face. We met in the lobby of the building that had served as a mutual enclave, where our pursuit of wisdom was tempered by the ravages of the 70s. We also shared in a distant way a musical odyssey, which would serve as the crazy glue binding the parallel paths that were separate and highly divergent.

Her musical sensibility would continue to inform her future, even when she pursued a world of advising and coaching leaders of business. She understood the performance values of her own work and the performance needs of her clients.

Hers has been a search for clarity, enduring the brambles and pitfalls that obscure our vision, fighting through to the clearing just ahead. I am reminded of Robert Frost's In the Clearing, his last volume of poems with a metaphor of discovery just up ahead, in the clearing. For me, the metaphor extends to the solstice as the "sun stands still" in a moment of clarity before moving on.

Naomi has reached a clearing, the passage to her renaissance. She has founded her own company, Practice Clarity, which reveals her passion for guiding others through the brambles and thickets to their own clear places where they are empowered to understand and act in the fullness of all they can become.

But perhaps the crowning centerpiece of Naomi's passage is that she is in the final stages of completing her Ph.D. As she pauses in this clearing and looks back over the rugged terrain she has had to endure, she appears to look in wonder and amazement as she enters this final phase of academia while launching an entirely new season of creativeness.

The Agony of Love

We sometimes develop relationships that define us to ourselves. Who knows the intricate mechanisms of obsessions, but I have found myself driven and inspired by distant and not so distant passions. These painful rejections (real or imagined) once resulted in some of my most inspired work. But I know it is out of character for our time.

Yet this has been the convention of the world. Unrequited love often results in masterpieces of art. The agony of love creates a vacuum, a void that must be filled. Agony once was not merely intense pain or suffering. It comes from the Greek agonia "a (mental) struggle for victory," originally "a struggle for victory in the games," from agon "assembly for a contest," from agein "to lead".

Agony is not only deep suffering, but a vying for victory, a conquest over the rejected love, not physically, but through the triumph of what emerges spiritually and artistically. Thus Beethoven in his agony and despair over the unreturned love of his distant beloved creates the first song cycle, An Die Ferne Geliebte, transcending the moment and living on in perpetuity.

Looking back, I am deeply indebted to all those stunning creatures who spurned me, rejected me, and treated me like dirt (knowingly or inadvertently). They triggered my most creative and original outbursts. Without them my life would have been mundane and colorless. It has been a joy to undergo such agony. To those who gave their love, I regret that my interior map was charted to agonize my way through relationships. The journey has been painful, but not without its moments. There is nothing like pain to let you know you are alive.

There really is no room for such agony in modern times.

The Substance of Time

Time and the experience of Time continue to elude me. Somehow, I understand Time to be the basis of all experience that stands outside of the senses and yet contains us within some illusionary cube without walls.

Space and Time appear to be the same reality experienced by the senses as two different modalities. But when we look through powerful telescopes into the far reaches of space, we look into the past, and the theory is that with a powerful enough looking glass we will actually be able to look back to the big bang. We peer into Time itself.

The clock of Time is light which ticks at the rate of 186,000 miles per second. Mathematics has given us glimpses of reality. We know that the dimensions perceived by senses imprison us within primitive strictures. The deception of the senses that space and time are separate domains is a convenience for human coherence.

Space expanding is Time Being. The main limitation of human physics is that it cannot truly accommodate Infinity. Infinity is the zero state. The substance of Time is the universe with all its spinning parts. In the final analysis Time and Space are the same energy, and All is infinite energy. This is in direct contradiction to Newton's laws since his reality never included consciousness but was stated as though reality could be described independent of consciousness.

Consilience

Consilience, the sudden "jumping together of everything " as Edward O. Wilson describes it in his book is a work of extraordinary insight and vision. Wilson is on a quest for the new golden grail, the unity of all knowledge, which has been the dream and inspiration of scientists, artists, and philosophers for ages. Einstein yearned for a theory of everything, and String Theory of the physicists metamorphed into M Theory as an explanation of all things cosmic and microscopic.

But Wilson sees the 21st century as an opportunity for the true unification of all knowledge, in which our understanding of genetic codes evolve into epigenetic rules that explain evolution, human nature, society, and culture, providing an undergirding of the physical sciences to support the social sciences, the arts, and humanities.

In the 21st Century there will be two ways to know the world absolutely: Science and the Arts. This is the culmination of the age of enlightenment begun in the 16th Century, but betrayed by those who stole the Enlightenment for the sake of seizing power.

Coevolution is an ongoing process and becomes a way of describing from a scientific perspective the interaction of genes with the environment to create the mind, and ultimately culture itself.

Wilson's work is compelling and elegant. It is a book about everything. but posited on a scientific structural foundation. Consilience is the recognition and understanding that everything is profoundly connected and can be perceived and described from any point in the spectrum of our knowledge and understanding.

Moonlight

In the moonlight, mystery awaits like a mystical messenger.

Moonlight is more like sound than light, sound we hear with our eyes, delicate decibels echoing across the terrain in the fragile shadows of the new moon, and the clarion call of the full moon that floods the earth with the gigantic resonance of a celestial organ...

The moon casts an eloquent spell over the earth, over those who watch the cycles of the moon work their magic on the tides and those of us tuned to its inspiring tones... the nuances shaping the night and those who watch in the shadow of the moon. Without the night and moonlight there would be no mystery.

There in the shadows is the birth of mystery and wonder, and the awesome presence of the moon adds incalculable intimacy and lustre to the worlding of ourselves...

Discovering a Poet

One of my favorite adventures is to raid the poem bin in a used-books bookstore. Small volumes of poems abound in these bins, and most of them have never been opened. Books of poems are always the first to be discarded, and usually the least regarded inventory with little attention paid to the upkeep of the books.

Yet waiting there are such wonderful explorations where words create new dimensions of experience, new insights, and explore deeper awareness of an elusive reality. One thing you know about these books. They come into being because someone loves words and the insights that poetic vision yields. My rule for choosing one book over another is that something must instantly grab my interest... a book title...a metaphor...a line....

...books like Glyn Maxwell's The Nerve with lines that tug at the imagination such as

Nothing that's been does anything but dance.
Nothing that blinked did anything but stare,
now being over, though the merest sense
of over is strange there.

The Structures of What Was

Or lines like:

The corners of our eyes,
cold and alert to missing them, report
a flash, and in the breeze
we turn our heads
to where the stars are quiet.

The Leonids

Leonids are meteor showers that appear to emanate from the constellation Leo.

Poets take us to new dimensions of ourselves and create new worlds from words colliding in new connections with each other. Maxwell sees the world differently, and his vision expands my world and my awareness. His is a world rich in structure, rhythm, flow, and metaphoric vision. There is economy of expression which always seems to find the perfect combination to generate new structures of meaning.

Coming upon Maxwell's poems in the piles and piles of discarded volumes was like discovering a parallel universe buried beneath crumbling constellations of words and letters. Here was a new sensibility, and my newly found windfall would take me many places where I could savor the work of an explorer of a universe that did not exist until Glyn Maxwell crafted and shared this miracle of his own making.

In his simplicity is such elegance that the lines continue to resonate long after the book is closed:

THE SNOW VILLAGE

In the age of pen and paper,
when the page was a snow village,
when days the light was leafing through
descended without message,

the nib that struck from heaven
was the sight of a cottage window
lit by the only certain
sign of life, a candle,

glimpsed by a stranger walking
at a loss through the snow village.
All that can flow can follow
that sighting, though no image,

no face appear -- not even
the hand that draws across it --
though the curtains close the vision,
though the stranger end his visit,

though the snow erase all traces
of his passage through the village,
though his step become unknowable
and the whiteness knowledge.

Glyn Maxwell

Kicking the Can

In the evenings in summer as we were growing up, we loved strategy games such as Kick the Can and Capture the Flag. These were the wargames of our youth.

These games were played usually in the late afternoons, when the heat of the day was beginning to yield to the approaching night. Choosing who was IT or captains and teams was always a ritual that had the trappings of spontaneity, but were usually just variations of the same theme. Kick the Can was like Hide and Seek with the taking of "prisoners." Everyone would hide while the person who was IT counted to a hundred. If IT spied any one and called their name, they became prisoners. Prisoners could get released if one of the hiders could reach the can and kick it before being seen by IT. If you beat IT to the can and kicked it, he must start counting again while everyone hides, but if IT reached the can first, the person trying to kick the can became the new IT.

Capture the Flag was a more elaborate game. You needed a minimum of six players (three to a side), but it was much more fun if you had many players. Each side would hide its flag, and the opposition would send forays into enemy territory to find the flag. Touching the enemy while they were in your territory made them prisoners. Finding the flag and bringing it to your territory constituted a victory. This was a game that was especially fun at night. I remember countless nights beneath the bright Texas sky with moonlight flooding the terrain where we vied against each other.

This was what we did in the days before television. We made our own entertainment and found ways to engage with each other. Such times led to many side excursions, stumbling upon adventures and dangerous liaisons. As we grew older, we played these games with much more at stake. Our movements were in automobiles, and the city was the playground. These were dangerous times, since nearly everyone carried guns. Now real enemies emerged and often, lives literally hung in the balance. The innocence of youth dissolved into the bravado of many who had become so bored with life that the only excitement to be had was seeing how close you could come to death and still survive. Now it would take much more than Kicking the Can to escape to freedom.

Forever Young

Greenwich Village is ageless, forever young. No one has really deciphered the secret of its perpetual youth. The Village holds onto this vigor, despite the meddling of outsiders and many challenges to the integrity of its existence.

Currently Greenwich Village is in the stranglehold of newstyle yuppies, and corporate America (including that wild and greedy private corporation, New York University), determined to choke the life out of the dynamism of this area that has always existed as a country within a country. At the moment, these challengers to the creative milieu of the Village appear to be winning on all fronts. In addition to the expanding tentacles of NYU, CVS and Duane Reade have replaced jazz and theatre landmarks on Bleecker street. An apartment building replaces the innovative presence of Theatre in the Square (which had been chased away from Washington Square by NYU) on Bleecker, a condominium appears to be replacing the tiny theatre on Sullivan Street that gave birth to The Fantasticks. NYU managed to drive the Bottom Line out of business so that great Village Landmark could be replaced by classrooms and a lecture hall. Even the Provincetown Playhouse is now under the aegis of NYU. The city, distressed by the lack of symmetry in Washington Square Park, is spending millions of dollars in public funds to move the central fountain a few feet in order to align it with the Arch and Fifth Avenue.

The Village has been the birthplace of many ideas that have challenged America and created a new culture. In the 1630s Dutch settlers cleared the land and named their settlement Noortwyck. To the north, the Village Grin'wich (1713) was once a rural hamlet, separate from New York City. When it was incorporated into the city, it retained the layout of streets, which was angular and antithetical to the logical square grid layout of the rest of the city. This lack of conformity geographically to the rest of the city reflects the divergent stance of the residents and artists who found the Village as a resonator for their progressive ideas.

The Village has been the Bohemia of the country, the home for the avant-gard and alternative culture with the small presses, art galleries, and experimental theatre and music. Every generation has found an important oulet there until now. Greats such as Maxwell Bodenheim, Eugene O'Neill, Jack Kerouac, Marcel Duchamp, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Bob Dylan flourished in the Village because the open spirit invited change.

Youth, more than anything is characterized by change. The Village has been the homeplace of our young thinkers and artists, and even now they flock to this historical birthplace of their predecessors. They have been forced underground by the establishment, and perhaps they are surfacing in newer progressive communities elsewhere.

But the beat goes on. Walk down any street in the Village and you will sense the underlying energy. Its eternal youth is vibrating all around you. In a matter of time, something wonderful will erupt once more, spawned in some movement on some tiny side street in the Village on the fringe of the corporate shadows that currently obscure the rich tradition of a continually changing and vibrant culture.

Tan Dun: A Shaman of Music Making

Tan Dun, who is known throughout the world for his film music (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) has been commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to compose The First Emperor. The opera will premiere December 21 with Placido Domingo in the title role. It will be conducted by Tan Dun, who also wrote the libretto along with the noted novelist Ha Jin, whose first full-length novel, Waiting is the winner of the 1999 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The opera will be directed by the celebrated film director Zhang Yimou, confirming Tan Dun's vision that cinema is the opera of our time.

Tan Dun has always approached his projects with fanatic energy and inspiration that fashions new forms and structures challenging the premises and fabric of the past. His "out of town try-out" took place about a month ago in Shanghai, and it was clear from the outset that Tan Dun had brought a new voice to the Metropolitan Opera:

The run-through began with pulsating drums. Singing in the style of Beijing opera, an ‘official geomancer’ introduced the story of Qin Shi Huangdi, the visionary and brutal warlord who unified China in 221 B.C …the music rose from the orchestra, alternately heroic, lyrical and haunting. Voices wove through the gongs, the bass flute and the plucked strings of ancient instruments as well as the orchestra’s standard violins and cellos, woodwinds and brasses.

--Sunday New York Times, May 14, 2006

Tan Dun is a shaman of music, where sound, text, visual art, video, and movement merge as a single entity, a magical and mystical expression that transforms time and space. Opera is the most extreme form of artistic collaboration --- the essence of art comes from opera, and such opera is the crystallization of life itself. Tan Dun delves into the spiritual realm of creation, penetrating and connecting many seemingly disparate realities into a new holistic and inspiring vision. He has a way of defining, connecting, and mapping the world that suggests a new paradigm for the 21st Century.

The Grand Opera of the 19th Century dominated the 20th Century, and premieres of contemporary works at the Met were often pale replicas of the past. Tan Dun is proposing a new direction, one in which the content of antiquity fuses with the dynamics of contemporary cross-cultural life. What may emerge anticipates the longing of our time for an authentic voice that assembles the unfolding worlds of East, West, North, and South, in cataclysmic collisions that tear off and shape chunks of past remote worlds into new spheres of influence and expression, much as the moon was created from the earth in a catastrophic episode with a rogue planet.

Tan Dun, as the rogue shaman who has infiltrated the establishment, may have the magic touch of an alchemist, transforming the wornout relics of the past into pure gold.

3 Zins Later

Once an inhabitant of Des Moines, 3 Zins Later (VJM) found herself plopped down in Fort Smith, Arkansas (You're not in Kansas anymore!) The spirit of her Blog, 3 Zins Later: "Etta James sings in the background, I love you circles the friendship, and Wine Night continues..." is an intriguing premise, born of the spirit of Des Moines, but now growing in the remote fields of a different place and sensibility.

Adjusting to suddenly being transplanted into a different place is usually not an easy transition for anyone, and VJM confronts these issues head on, but many remain unresolved. There is no question the stories are there, waiting to be discovered, uncovered from memory and imagination. But her Blog reveals that there are also new stories bubbling over in the context of personal crises. VJM is a story teller, and all we need are the 3 Zinfandels and candles burning, and the stories will rise like smoke from the candles filling the air with scents and textures of the past. I sense a reticence to embrace the level of intimacy that 3 Zins Later's banner suggests, almost in a whisper...

We are invited to lean forward. Stretch out our hands, and maybe she will read our story from the Tarot cards that are part of her personal treasure. These are more than cards. Through the Tarot she connects with a deep awareness of spiritual forces linking us to one another and to destiny itself.

She has slowly expanded her presence in her blog. Her style is starting to shine through. She is easing into the space, observations spilling out in increments. Reality intrudes as a tyrannical diversion, and her energy is directed at day-to-day survival. Even so, we long for the chance to turn down the lights and discover the quiet revelations of her world still in the act of becoming.

Catching Up With the Blackholes

Something there is about "being behind" that is part of the human condition in modern times. It is a terrible way to live, because such a sensibility robs me of the abundance of Now, and divides my attention so that my energy is diverted and blunted. I suppose this comes from the obsession of list-making for the sake of being organized and efficient. These lists live in our heads and guide us through our tasks, each path focused on clear destinations.

So I find myself running through this gauntlet of lists, of dividing the lists into personal lists and work lists, and gauging my success as to how many tasks I have crossed off, but always adding more in the process. And when I am idle, I find myself creating lists... just for the sake of lists. Lists are linear, and at heart, I am not really a linear person.

I am a broad spectrum person, a person who functions best when on the edge of chaos, and I delight in seeing the debris of order crumble at the edges like the huge sheets of ice at the polar caps that sheer off from the mainland and disappear into the global-warmed ocean. Yet, if I exist in the aleatoric, non-ordered world, I know it is an illusion. Isn't chaos merely the mirrored reflection of order? Chaos IS Order.

Without the linear lists, what paths would I take through the murky haze of the not-knowing Now? Yet, I discover more moving through the fragments and madness of my personal blackholes that stand between me my singularity. Once thought of as the ultimate destructive force in the universe, blackholes have been discovered to be the source for the creation of all galaxies. So I am delightfully adrift in the disarray of my own new galaxies now ready to burst into being.

Lightning

Lightning is the universe energizing the earth, the dynamism of solar forces ripping through the fabric of the planet with dazzling vigor. It is more than just the discharge of negative and positive ions, and we are just now learning that although we have regarded the earth as self-contained eco-system, it is deeply and tangibly affected by the many forces in the solar system, the galaxies, and the universe. We simply have lacked the means to detect and measure such energy. My intuition is that lightning will be discovered as one way of capturing and renewing energies of the earth. Energy flows into the atmosphere from outer space and finally is released through turbulent storms of lightning. Yes, I know this is counter to conventional wisdom, but I have detected acknowledgements here and there of forces from outerspace impacting on the eco-system of the globe in ways not yet fully understood.

The other evening we were treated to a brilliant lightning storm. Looking north from the apartment, we could see the storm approaching, see the flashes of lighting in the distance, and hear the far away rumbling of thunder. The flashes created arcs across the sky and tumbled down to the earth in multiple jagged spears that disappeared behind the skyline.

As the storm approached, the thunder grew louder and the lightning spears more intense in electrifying incandescence. Don't say that lightning never strikes twice, as I watched the Empire State building absorb several bolts, so fierce that I thought I could feel the electricity coursing down through the wires to the ground.

What was so fascinating about this display? There is no question that the discharge of such power evokes our riveted attention. But equally attractive is the unpredictability of the moment. Anticipating the next strike, you hang on the quiet pauses in between (I call them pausations), and when the storm is upon us, we feel each crashing intrusion into the moment as an explosion, an invasion that crashes through us as a visceral blow. Somehow our environment has become an awesome bully, threatening us to take note of our place or face instant extinction.

I have noticed that as science and technology have attained greater influence on our thinking, a cult of extinction has emerged. The new priests look ahead to the death of planets, the death of stars, the death of the universe itself. Extinction is the natural order. It was time for the dinosaurs to die, and soon, we will lose the moon, or be destroyed by a random rolling stone from the asteroid belt, or the sun will spear us with a devastating flare.

Our fate is sealed, or so the new high priests of science and technology would have us believe. And yet, even as we think we know everything, we may have entered an enormous Dark Age in which too much information is more stifling than no information. We have always had the doomsdayer, who like Robert Herrick reminds us that the time for living is Now and only Now:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.

Yet, I know that even now, our concepts of the universe, generated from shopworn equations in physics are giving way to perceptions of parallel universes and the existence of time before the big bang.

Maybe there is hope for us yet.

Beyond Borders

Although some favorite places for me are "used" bookstores such as Strands or the Mercer Street Bookstore, an even headier afternoon is spent at new bookstores. Borders is nearby, so is Barnes & Noble, and Shakespeare & Company Booksellers. Although Shakespeare's remains in the vein of a classical bookstore, Barnes & Noble and Borders are a new breed, a kind of comfortable library for browsing in the hopes that we will decide to buy. In many communities, these bookstores become cultural meeting places and have served to underscore the importance of books in our lives. If anything, digital technology has made the book format even more popular and readily available.

Walking into such a place, seeing the Starbucks-like atmosphere, people lounging in easy chairs and sofas with stacks of books, others in the coffee-shop area with stacks of books on tables and lattes in hand, makes me want to read everything at once. First the titles beckon, urging me to discover their hidden meanings, and artwork abounds with seductive shapes and colors. I grow drunk with expectation.

I attack the books randomly, going first to the tables filled with new fiction. I open a book to some random page and begin reading, after several paragraphs or pages, depending on how the prose grabs me, I go on to another book, and another book... a literal infusion of words, a transfusion of prose, an array of styles, all coming together with abrupt swiftness and opening my mind, expanding me to places beyond... Time is suspended and I am immersed in the miracle of writing... transported beyond the borders of my own confines into the minds and sensibilities of many authors.

There are so many new and good writers, all deserving to be read. Such great styles, and so many ways to invent new worlds. I carry out these maneuvers every Saturday in some unsuspecting frontier of literature. The words lay between covers, waiting to ignite the passions of browsers, to convert them to readers and advocates. Words and phrases are waiting to unleash the energy of the imagination in countless ways. And I am poisd on the brink of new adventures all erupting beyond the borders of my mind.

"I Don't Know": The Genius of Kim Myung Sook

I Do Not Know
Poem by Han Yong-un performed by Youngju Kang


I have commented on this beautiful poem in an earlier blog, "I Do Not Know." Now I will describe a work of art that has subsequently emerged from this poem, the creation of Kim Myung Sook, an inspired dance that relies on the poem as a point of departure and celebrates the Korean experience, identity, and the fabric of life as humans existing as elemental earth. Recently the Korean government gave a special award to Dr. Kim for the outstanding contrbution of this work to Korean culture.

This remarkable artist has painted a masterpiece of dance where movement unfolds like brushstrokes and choreographic calligraphy... her dance group is Nuhui, a dance troup that has served as the canvas for Kim's explorations of movement, color, space, and structure. Kim has fashioned a cultural icon in her realization of the poem, extracting profound elements of Zen Buddhism to explore the essence of the poem and the spirituality of the Korean Psyche.

Kim has always had a sensitive eye, designing her own graphics and controlling every nuance of color and costume much as the great film director Antonioni. Her choreography frequently takes on the vocabulary of cinema, and Kim often creates video versions of the dances that employ cinematic effects such as cross dissolve and superimposed images.

This new work is closely related to the narrative structure of Han Yong-un's poem. As we listen to the performance of the poem, we can hear the textures and rhythms that find their way into movement and sound. Youngju Kang's eloquent rendering of Han's poem creates a sense of wonder and awe, and the sheer beauty of the language permeates our sensibiity in a profound awareness of mystery and revelation.

Here is a synopsis of the dance structure:
Prologue.
Dancers : Kim Yul Hee, Pak Koung Eun, Kim Whal Ran, Bea Jin Yl, Lee Jung Min, Lee Eun Jung, Lee Yoon Kyoung, O Ji Young, Kim Yuen Hee, Yoon Ji Yang. Musician : Son Bum Ju playing a reed instrument (sort of traditional pipe)
Act I. [Sae Oul] - green fountain from east / sound of water and rainfall...
Dancers : Yoon Jueng Min, Kim Yul Hee, Pak Koung Eun, Kim Whal Ran, Bea Jin Yl, Lee Jung Min, Lee Eun Jung
Act II. [Mu Ji Gae Sal] - over the rainbow / Gayageum
Act III. [Nat Dal] - moon rising in the afternoon / Voice
Act IV. [Mu Geoung Ji Hea] - everlasting being / Korean traditional fiddle (violin)

Prologue -- Kim draws upon an austere palette for sound, the sounds of an ancient windpipe, as though summoning the spirit of Korea to attend a celebration. Sun Bum Ju produces an inspired melody that penetrates and envelops the emptiness. The dancers awaken to discover themselves in the midst of antiquity merging with the present..not only awaken but seem to be created out of the mists and textures of the infinite moment. The sounds of the windpipe are evocative, as though Silence itself had discovered its own true voice. The music fades into darkness dissolved by a steady, refreshing rain.

Act I -- The rain brings new images of dancers around fountains flowing from some infinite wellspring... the dancers are vertical with an outstretched arms extending their reach as though gathering the rain. The way they surround the fountains evokes the image of a temple, the guardians of the flowing force of life...Sounds of distant thunder welcome the ritual, the quiet celebration of an undefined presence... the rain yields to the sound of water flowing...


Act II -- a cascade of sounds, the ancient harplike sounds of the Kayageum spill through the space while a lone traditional flute soars through the texture like a rainbow. Flowing water in fountains sustain us, the ebb and flow of life reach to the source of our identity in a cold and alien universe. The water welcomes us, nourishes us, delights in our delight. A swirl of sound encasing the flute...dancers swirling...lingering...in final gestures of celebration...a final touch of the fountain... withdrawing and fading into the clouds concealing a revelation...

Act III -- Wind and the sound of the surf rip through the terrain, the dancers run forward like the wind sweeping the ocean... and in the wind we hear the voice of I Don't Know, the text now transformed into a profound prayer in a most expressive and sustained performance, beautifully drawn out in a flowing musical line sustained by the wind and waves in lingering counterpoint.The dancers attend the poem in awe as worshippers of the source of wonder... reaching a sense of supreme ecstacy... above, butteflies hover in evocation of an endless sky...

Act IV -- A harbor bell sounds in the night... we see the ocean in the distance and the waves upon the beach, accompanied by the incessant sounds of the surf... almost imperceptibly we see the dawn slowly glowing and dancers emerging from the ocean like life itself...the dancers are part of the ocean... a Korean fiddle creates a soliloquy with the surf, a comment on the mystery and awe of the night, the endless ocean, and the slowly emerging enlightenment of the dawn... a light in the center of the stage flickers through the shadows and movements of the dancers and we sense this to be the source of ourselves, forever enclosed within our wonder and embrace... and yet, in the enveloping darkness our wonder continues and echoes... I Do Not Know... I Do Not Know... I Do Not Know...

The sculpture work of You, Young-kyo is inspired, the stone pools and butterflies add to the spiritual presence of the work. The composer and music director Hwang, Byoung-ki helps set the musical texture that melds with the layers of visual richness and structured movement.

Yuoul, the Kayageum ensemble, adds color and antiquity to the over all impression of sound. The sound design by Kim, Tae-gun establishes an ambience that envelops in the dance in the resonance of rain, wind, thunder, and silence. The baritone Sin Kyoung-ok provided one of the most remarkable performances in his singing of the poem, an inspired and inspiring performance. The poem was set to music by Hwang, Byoung-ki(he put the rhythm on the poem as lylic song). Jeung, Soo-nyun's Korean fiddle cuts through the surf and wind of the final movement like a spontaneous prayer. These artists and the dancers provided an extraordinary immediacy that transformed the many parts into an integral whole.

Kim Myung Sook has created a tour de force of movement, sound, and shape that provides a framework of introspection and revelation. The dancers combine with the musicians, the sculptor, the sound and light designers to weave an inspired tapestry of a work that fuses the past and present, the unique with the universal. The grace, agility, and sheer virtuosity of the dancers is tempered by the deep respect bestowed upon the work by these performing artists. Each dancer establishes a distinct individual quality while contributing to the whole.

Kim does not attempt to answer the questions of the poem. She goes beneath the answers to the essence of the questions themselves and provides insights into the fundamental resonance of ourselves within the world that is our dwelling place.