From the third act of TIDES OF THE WOLF, in which two sisters, Nara the older and Amana, daughters of a drug-addled autarch, deal with the deliquescence of the world in a time of climate change.
Entering the theatre, audience members whisper into a magic lantern their favorite and most accursed first experiences of love.
Because performance contains our greatest wishes for love and recognition, and because any adult beloved contains mirrorlike shards of our first experiences of intimacy, creating an imago or composite of all these moments, and further, that any moment of breathing together with other mammals in a dark hypo-oxygenated space for constrained duration – i.e., most theatrical work – constitutes an act of collective intimacy, the immersive third-act projection brings about, at the very least, mass exorcism.
Amana’s discovery of giant wolf washed up downstage, newly relit.
Amana (to wolf)
O gentle giant.
For you I would fetch water from the tropics.
For you destroy public polling-booths.
No sense of restraint in me for you.
What god chooses to talk so to me
In the small hours?
Once I was young and sky-new
No longer a bright baby clay-molded
But traipsing through
Prowling all this swelling.
And I swear I knew light like you.
What in you is so familiar?
Love like you.
Who brought you.
Why have you come.
What respect do you need?
Are you a body wasting or waxing?
Such a bush of dry hair!
Can you hear me?
Stamp your face on me.
Did you hear me wolf?
(whispering /echo?)
I love you.
Interlude. Amana runs back to older sister Nara. Wordlessly points and tells.
Let us not stay too near
This fallen beast.
Discretion
Must be our guide.
Amana
Your face has lost itself.
Nara
That beast might hear us.
Girls make various animal sounds—not Peer Gynt, but not so far either. Consider Oophoi’s Trifada, Part II. A whippoorwill’s call and response.
Dance of poking, though Nara pulls away.
Here the projection casts a different vision made from the memories of the audience, employing a computer algorithm which transforms the intermission whispers into ideals of eros and agape. While these bear specific relevance to the histories of the audience, they are also prescriptively universalized toward the platonic realm limned by courtly love or pop songs.
While for Amana, love is fruit and dance, for Nara, love rests on space, order, columns, ceremony, while the audience has desires that remain to be seen.
New crescendo and dissonance nonetheless lets one melody ride above the clash. One audience member is charged with the task of running onto the stage and dismantling the whole collective production and dream, tearing apart the set, wrecking all and inviting others to join in the spoilage.
Finally: