A six-hour, five-location interactive performance/event, based on the myth of Orpheus.
Orpheus was an enactment of the Orpheus myth, in which the audience accompanied Orpheus on his journey to the Underworld, consulted with the Oracles, and assisted Orpheus in playing the music that released Eurydice.
Orpheus was my first large-scale, outdoor piece. It was a six hour, interactive performance event, which took place on the street, in five lofts and galleries, and across a river. It included music and dancing, dinner, a boat ride, sound installations, video and performances.
This performance was the logical extension of my work in creating performances in which the audience takes an active role. This was the first one, however, that really erased the line between performer and audience member.
With Orpheus, I was interested in combining real time with ritual time, so that in a single event there would be multiple layers of reality. I wanted to create a situation in which an audience would view the entire environment with all the random events and interactions within it, as part of the piece; where the audience views the richness of the real world with a heightened sense of reality.
The piece incorporated performances ranging from scripted to improvised. It included sections where the audience members functioned as witnesses or viewers, to parts where the audience was a participant. It also included related events on the street, which were not always recognized as planned parts of the performance. The characters/characterizations ranged from mythic to contemporary, sometimes within the same scene.
Music dominated the event. It ranged from music played by Orpheus to music played by the entire audience. A large sound installation was created over the river, which surrounded the audience as they traveled over the river by boat. Music emanated from windows, parked cars, even bushes, as the audience walked down the streets between the locations. Specific sound environments were created at each of the Oracles.
An audience member wrote afterwards, “Where Orpheus succeeds is in blurring the lines between theater and real life, theater dissolving into the everyday. Since as the evening progressed one questioned more and more what was preplanned and what was chance, who was a member of the cast and who was a passerby, consequently everything about one, intended or not, became absorbed in the production, – so that one could witness a drunk directing the Furies across downtown traffic or laugh about how one gets the McDonalds franchise in the Underworld, and ultimately one could feel how the unfolding of an ancient myth could fall into place in one’s own backyard.”
