"A Hero is Wise & Gentle"
Notes from a Myth Lab workshop
This month we’re hosting two more Myth Lab evenings on Thursdays September 11th and September 25th at Brooklyn’s Library for Arts and Culture. Each free workshop brings together a group of artists who are imagining and reimagining fresh myths. The next session, on 9/11, will bring together poet, musician, and Rumi translator Haleh Liza Gafori, movement artist Tamara Belinda, and ritualist, performer, and theatre-maker Kasey O’Brien. RSVP & share.
How do you start an evening devoted to myth during our freighted, ugly present era? Artist Alexandra Neuman led us in an exorcism.
She gathered up some of the demons from workshop participants—the capitalism and dominance that can possess our collective culture; the fear that resides in the personal heart. We hummed, chanted, spoke, embodied the syllables and inhabiting madnesses—and cast them out. Alex blew the huge, deep note of the shofar—the ram’s horn trumpet of Jewish ritual, which has deep roots in the temple culture of the Near East. In Lagash, an ancient city at the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, a hymn describes the city governor placing the lyre and drums in front of a statue of Nanse, goddess of the sea and marshes. It describes sacred song performed with copper ringers while the chief musician played the ibex horn. The sound goes back, goes deep. In Judaism it sounds for the new year, the new moon, for exorcism, calling in new energies.
Alex blew the shofar and the workshop participants uttered what they want to speak into the world: visions of mutuality, safety, and love.
Alex spoke about how much of her artistic myth-making focuses on creating new eco-feminist myths, but that watching the atrocities in Gaza sent her back to the Judaism she grew up with, to revisit and reweave those myths and bring forth legacies of wisdom and mysticism.
Composer Derek Weagle, our second guest, picked up the theme, speaking about the alienation of growing up with Christian creation stories that exclude queerness and that motivated them to create the stunning supernovas, the ecstatic, galactic creation myth of their orchestral work “Doubtless Magick.”
Into the fresh space Alex had created, we listened to and read the libretto from Derek’s incandescent first movement. Later in the evening, one of the participants quoted it back to me.
To close us out, clown, performer, and founder of Butch Mermaid Productions Ania Upstill spoke about the wisdom of letting the body lead us toward the new. They had us stand in a circle for an image theatre exercise. We turned away and then towards one another, making different shapes with our bodies to evoke gifts and joy. They said, now embody a hero.
We turned into the circle in our hero poses, and then stepped toward the people who’d made a similar movement. Some of the folks in my group had been thinking of traditional hero-stories: of a Hercules who’s strong and courageous or a Christ who’s self-sacrificing. My favorite comment was the companion who said, “A hero is wise and gentle.”
As we talked, Ania went around, placing tiny leaves and bits of herb that grow outside L10 cultural center in our hands. They asked us, “what kind of hero would protect this tiny leaf?”
We formed a circle again and this time embodied the kind of hero who would protect the leaf. Then Ania asked us to move from our first default hero pose to our second, holding leaf in heart and hand. Bodies softened, gestures became subtler. This is how cultural change happens. Going from one story to another. We imagine one body or pose and then start to envision and to emulate another. If we’ve created a culture that treats brawn and force or self-sacrifice as heroic we can create also one that elevates gentleness and receptivity.
The governor of Lagash once participated in ritual and made offerings of musical instruments. We can and we will transform what power means today.
As the workshop closed, we found the ones who’d embodied a similar leaf-protecting hero—in my group’s case, we’d ended up close to the ground. Seeking out others who’d had a similar vision was a reminder that creativity and heroism are communal, not individual. With the last couple minutes of the workshop, I asked participants to go up to someone they hadn’t spoken to yet and say a word or two about what mythic visions they were taking with them. The room instantly transformed into a field of animated conversations.
Come join us; we’re not through yet.
Please explore Alex, Ania, and Derek’s work. Alex’s Psalms of Planetary Devotion and Derek’s Doubtless Magick are featured on The Myth Lab. New Yorkers, come to the Myth Lab evening at L10 in a week on Thursday the 11th: 7pm, The Library for Arts & Culture, 10 Lafayette Avenue in Brooklyn with guests Haleh Liza Gafori, Kasey O’Brien, and Tamara Belinda.
Next week on The Myth Lab, notes on creating an epic of peace.