Ego Alter

(Including Sacred Space pre-show interactive installation, Complexity Addicts and Tour)

You are invited to play the chimes before the show and again at intermission. Please use flashlights to illuminate the performers.

Choreographer’s Notes

(What is all that crazy counting? And why are they all acting so weird?)

What is God? He is length, width, height, and depth.

– St Bernard of Clairvaux, On Consideration

We can only experience what our embodiment allows us to experience.

We can only conceptualize using conceptual systems grounded in our bodily experience.

We can only reason by means of our embodied, imaginative rationality.

– Mark Johnson, Embodied Reason

All movement tends into space, both the space around us and the space within us.

– Rudolf Laban, A Vision of Dynamic Space

I am inspired by our idiosyncratic humanity and by the myriad selves we store in our bodyminds. I am fascinated by Sacred Geometry, the mystical rhythms and proportions which underlie the structure of the universe and life itself. Thinkers in ancient Egypt, Greece, and India recognized that numbers could describe much of what they saw in their world and could provide insight into its divine creation. The Fibonacci series (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…), Phi (f = 1.618…), and the Golden Mean (Divine Proportion) are harmonic ratios and rhythms that weave through the world we experience in constant flux around us. In my choreography I celebrate these harmonic principles.

The Fibonacci series (named after a 13^th-century Italian theorist) mathematically describes a spiral and lies at the core of life’s first principle, that of growth. In his epic study of the spiral, The Curves of Life, Sir Theodore Cook (1867-1928) illustrates the direct relationship between the principles of growth and beauty in both art and nature. Using mathematical analysis he demonstrates the harmonic structure of art and architecture, arguing that great works of artistic creation, like nature, approximate “the experiences of mankind… in the proper use of f.”

The asymmetric, dynamic power of f (Phi) governs the breeding pattern of rabbits, the branching of leaves, the swirling of the cosmos, the horns of a ram, and the double helix of DNA. Our human bodies contain beautiful spiraling bones, heart muscles, umbilical chord, and cochlea of the inner ear. The plants we hold in Ego Alter are constantly growing, distributing their leaves in Fibonacci sequence around their stalks. According to Pythagoreus (6^th c. B.C.E), the Golden Mean spiral (seen in the conch shell and in the curled fetus of humans and animals) embodies the dynamics of the rhythmic generation of the cosmos, and through its harmonic principle represents universal love.

I organized the movement for Ego Alter according to choreographer and theorist Rudolf Laban’s system of Space Harmony. The father of European Modern Dance, Laban (1879-1957) studied Sacred Geometry and discovered that human movement fits nicely into Platonic Solids such as the icosahedron (whose three intersecting Golden Rectangles we animate musically with chimes). He scripted movement sequences (scales) that organize space and shape change in regular interweaving rhythms describing spatial and mathematic harmony. Throughout Ego Alter we manipulate our bodies according to Laban’s movement scales and allow our minds to experience memory, image, and feeling in each physical contortion, pushing ourselves through a wide range of “the experiences of mankind.”

The text for Ego Alter is generated by individual performers in each moment as they respond to the particular shape in which they find themselves. The feelings, texts, and characters are subject to change from performance to performance. We have scripted only the physical shapes and the morphing between these shapes, according to harmonic rhythms inside the icosahedron (mostly) and octahedron (a bit).

The hanging set is based on geometric analysis of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vesuvius Man, which conforms to ancient biometrics, a system for measuring the human body in relation to Golden Mean. The icosahedrons in Ego Alter each contain a complete diatonic scale (twelve tones, one per corner) embraced by Laban’s contemporary Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), who revolutionized the way we hear music with his atonal twelve-tone composition technique.

In Gratitude

I am grateful to my performers for their creativity and for their commitment to the project. Also to Keith Hennessy, Della Davidson, Miguel Frasconi, Peggy Hackney, Lynette Hunter, David Grenke, Barbara Sellers-Young, Stephanie Linakis, Ashley Gould, Ed Mechem, Christopher Schardt, Daniel Neeland (the make-it-work man), Roxanne Femling, Ned Jacobson, Darrell Winn, Sam Shirley, Bridgett Davis, Cary Babka, Liliana Madrid, Erie Vitiello, Ed & Rhonda O’Brien, the Department of Theater and Dance, the original cast of Complexity Addicts (Tara Brandel, Katarina Eriksson, Stephanos Georgantis, Meadow Leys, and Jenny Schaffer) and of Tour, CounterPULSE and Dancers’ Group in SF. Huge thanks to so many others for critical feedback and support along the way. And hats off to Erin Badillo!!