The Opening Itinerary
Along the ladder of consciousness.
The Meeting in the Cave opening Itinerary — The Cave 3.0 “Prologue” and “Epilogue”. [*]
By bringing together the traditional building-based opera practice and the conventional street performance, the work challenges both the theatrical code and the audience/performer relationship. The audience is choreographed to physically move in and around the installation, mingling performers, pedestrian and random visitors in an itinerary shaped by a string of movements and technological data part of the overall scenographic and dramaturgical score. The Prologue and the Epilogue performed outside of the venue outdate the building-based drama practice while retrieving its original ritual dimension; it creates a trans-cultural bond between the distinct demographics, the site history, the text, and the technology, sequencing the time-space digital continuum straight into the narrative, with a strategy that enhances awareness and the production of the cultural and social space. Additionally, it generates an inclusive ‘mesoteric’ fluid environment also accessible to usually non-operagoers or excluded audience, expanding the collective intelligence of the community and elevating the audience, the performers and the performance itself to a higher level of shared embodied experience, a finer frequency overturning the overall energetic flow from polarisation to inclusion, that is to say, from duality to singularity.
On the plan of the operatic performance, the two polarities co-protagonists of the work are embedded in four degrees of manifestation: i) The Guardians of the Threshold — holographic imagery, almost impalpable matter to the ordinary sense; at the entrance of the Cave/Venue; ii) the Guardians of the Commissure — transparent acrylic glass, barley visible matter; within the Eye space; iii) the Royal Couple — the bi-dimensional characters in costume[1] of the “Lectori Benevolo” first page (:5) of the Meetings with Remarkable Women narrative; and iv) the two human actors — the four-dimensional embodiment of the Royal Couple in costume; at the entrance of the Eye space.
Time and space schedule.
All times are in Eastern Standard Time (EST) – (UTC/GMT -5). All scenes unfolding in a Nodal Partner’s area at that time-slot are live-streamed to all the other Nodal Partners, showing and signalling the relative position of the Royal Couple in the overall itinerary.
10:37 Astronomical Equinox.
The Opening Itinerary. Cave 3.0 “Prologue” scene. Seven+ stations on the territory for rest & refreshments along the way.
- 17:00 (TBC). The official opening of the installation – The opening of the Cave space. From the heart of the Cave, the digital sound system sends the first note (frequency) of the Cave 3.0 musical theme to the
- MIDI controller, which triggers the mechanical sound system of the Gebrüder Bruder[2] organ at heart of the Jane’s Carousel and continues playing the whole theme in a loop.
- The music is live-streamed and broadcasted aloud in each Nodal Partner, lining-up the 7 nodal points, dimensions, chakras, etc.
- 17:30. The opening of the Eye space — The official opening of the exhibition. Once the musical theme has been heard in the Eye space, the Royal Couple characters standing at the entrance in their Lectori Benvolo costumes, grant access to the Eye space to visitors and the Meetings with Remarkable Women livre d’artiste exhibition starts. The scene is live-streamed in all Nodal Partners’ areas.
- 18:30. After about an hour, the Royal Couple exits the MoMA premises to board a yellow Chevy 57 Bel Air convertible waiting in front of the building — the same vehicle is a prop on stage closing the first scene (Act. I,1,2:18). At the wheel, an actor in an orangutan[3] costume. While looking at the surrounding people watching the scene, the Royal Couple cheerfully takes sit on the back-bench, ready to starts their journey along the ladder of consciousness, whilst the scene, and the whole itinerary are live-streamed by a phone video camera[4] to all Nodal Partners.
- Inside of each Nodal Partner the Couple is offered refreshment and, while the musical theme and the scenes from the other areas are screened within the area, they involve visitors and audience in a canovaccio[5]-based improvisation on the cultural connotation of that Nodal Partner in which they are in, and on one of the geo-cultural area of the opera; arising awareness on the event, connecting the audience to the work by words, anecdotes, gestures, jokes and gags, seeding all Nodal Partners with their performance streamed in the other nodal spaces.
18:30 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) — Rockefeller Center (1.3 km – 7’)
11 W 53rd St — 45 Rockefeller Plaza
18:40 Rockefeller Center — Morgan Library (1.4 km – 7’)
45 Rockefeller Plaza — 225 Madison Ave
19:00 Morgan Library — School of Visual Arts (1.5 km – 6’)
225 Madison Ave — 209 E 23rd St
19:20 School of Visual Arts — The Orpheum Theatre (1.4 km – 4’)
209 E 23rd St — 126 2nd Ave
19:40 The Orpheum Theatre — Tenement Museum (1.3 km – 7’)
126 2nd Ave — 103 Orchard St
20:00 Tenement Museum — Venue/Cave Space (4.3 km – 17’)
103 Orchard St — Old Dock St, Brooklyn
7. 20:30. Venue/Cave Space — Start of the Cave 3.0 Performance.
When the Couple reaches the Cave/Venue at the other end of the itinerary where the opera is going to premiere, it is first greeted on the red carpet by the Guardians of the Threshold holograms at the doorway of the Cave before entering and opening-up the theatre space to the audience, then it disappears inside the Cave in full darkness. It follows the “Overture” (Act I: 9) with the flickering hologram lights inside the Cave and the appearance on the stage of the two co-protagonists characters (Act I, 1: 13). At the end of the scene (Act I, 1: 18), the co-protagonists leave the stage on the yellow Bel Air prop with the feminine polarity at the wheel.
7+. 23:00. Jane’s Carousel. — Epilogue of the Cave 3.0 opera.
At the end of the 7th scene, the “Epilogue” of the opera, likewise its “Preamble”, is performed outside of the Venue/Cave.
While the Gebrüder Bruder plays the musical theme in a loop, the performers and the ca. 300 people of the audience exit the Venue/Cave to perform the “Epilogue” on the Jane’s Carousel nearby, in 6 shifts of 50 units each for 3 complete rides on the 30 ‘jumpers,’ the 18 ‘standers’ horses and the 2 chariots, spinning the emerging wave of awareness around the axis mundi of the ‘carousel of life’, before returning home, or having a pizza at Grimaldi’s in the neighbourhood. Incoherently coherent.
End of the Opening Itinerary – Epilogue of the Cave 3.0 opera.
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[*] On the Spring Equinox when day and night are equal all over the world and the Sun stands directly above the equator crossing from north to south the Northern Hemisphere, the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), for practical purposes equivalent to the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), marks the beginning of a new season, at all other times, the length of day and night is different, imbalanced. A new cycle is kicking in, a time of deep change, to let go of old leaves, of karmic debris, ashes, remains of combustion … with some refreshing rainfalls to tune into the natural rhythm of the planet spinning around the Sun at the edge of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way.
On Earth, the opening itinerary of the Meeting in the Cave meta-installation is itself the “Prologue” scene of the Cave 3.0 opera, performed by the actors outside of the Cave stage, in the urban environment, from the MoMA in Midtown Manhattan city centre to the Jane’s Carousel at the periphery in the Brooklyn Bridge Park. A combination of contemporary street-theatre and the Thespian itinerant wagon tradition from post to post, from Nodal Partner to Nodal Partner, all the way through.
[1] Mary Magdalene, Carlo Crivelli, ca. 1485; and The Imperial Guard, Heinrich Carl Wilhelm Berghaus, Die Völker des Erdballs nach ihrer Abstammung und Verwandtschaft, und ihren Eigenthümlichkeiten in Regierungsform, Religion, Sitte und Tracht … Mit … colorirten Abbildungen, 1845: 964, in Meetings with Remarkable Women, Excerpted Guests, page xxii.
[2] The Gebrüder Bruder (Brothers Brother) was a successful fairground book-operated mechanical organ of the German Waldkirch firm and was in production from before World War One right through to the end of the 1920s. The organ is capable of producing superb music despite the limited 52 keyless scale. The Model 107 dating 1920 at the heart of Jane’s Carousel, nowadays provided with a MIDI interface, is perfectly matching the conservation of the ethnomusicological heritage aim of the Spanda Musiké project.
[3] The name “orangutan” (also orang-utan, orang utan, orangutang, and ourang-outang) derives from the Malay and Indonesian words orang, “person”, and hutan, “forest”, thus “person of the forest”.
Orangutans are great apes native to Indonesia and Malaysia, currently only found in the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra. They are the most solitary of the great apes and among the most non-human intelligent primates, able to figure out some invisible displacement problems with a representational strategy. Their societies are made up of resident and transient individuals of both sexes. Resident females live with their offspring in defined home ranges; most social bonds occur between adult females and their dependent offspring; adult males and independent adolescents of both sexes tend to live alone.
Orangutans are a critically endangered species as their habitat has decreased severely in ranges and populations due to human activities — logging and forest fires, fragmentation by roads, conversion of vast areas of tropical forest to palm oil plantations.
[4] Here the car represents the mechanical, physical, body; its engine, the instinctual and sensitive faculties; the steering wheel, the mind giving direction to the engine; the driver, the intellect, in a certain stage of evolution, addressing the mind; the Royal Couple on the back bench, the polar soul, instructing the intellect to navigate from dimension to dimension; the phone camera, the higher self, the inner witness recording the action, yet not involved in it — even though the observer inevitably influence the observed — all aligned by the intent of reaching destination, attaining enlightenment.
[5] A canovaccio (It.), “that which is pinned to the canvas” is a scenario used by Commedia dell’Arte players. It consists of a string of fixed nodal actions to be executed in succession in performing the plot of a play, with the details of the connective tissue between the fixed actions ad impromptu by the actors. The canovaccio script is pinned to the back of the scenery.
#UnfoldingAlong
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Meeting in the Cave is a non-profit endeavour
of cultural philanthropy of the Spanda Foundation.
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