Last night we performed a rather strange little piece that could only have come about as a melange of the strangely active minds of Sam, Katah, Jerome, Richard, Dennis, Nick, Lina, Jim Higgins and Antoinette. We put it together in 3 to 5 days, not counting beginning conceptual conversations and research. 

 This kind of speed can be energizing and enervating simultaneously. In the midst of creative panic, one finds oneself following intuition, since there is no time to rationalize the linear projection of a scene, or to make the connections that one normally expects from scene to scene. There were suggestions from all of us, and the ideas that seemed physically possible with what was on hand at the moment in terms of props, puppets, costumes, fragments of research, were the ones we used.  This kind of intuitive, do or die, improvisational style is related both to commedia dell-arte technique, as well as the surreal "exquisite corpse”, an exercise in which the communication between participants can approach the telepathic. (Maybe)

 Minutes before performance I realized that I was in every scene with a costume change in between each one.  There were ten scenes.

 In the first scene, I was a demon in a barong mask, while Sam and Katah were King Ubu and Ma Ubu in UBU masks with dollar signs painted on them. They were running from their own subconscious fears, and I surprised them wherever I could. I used Martha Graham style movements, while draped in red flames. I attempted to depict various levels of demonic existence, including the suffering of demons.

 We did this on our "constructivist" stage, which consists of two levels, and several "rooms" below, and a bridge above connecting two parts, some spaces were blocked off with paper, to be seen through, and other parts were draped in black cloth, with entrances in two places and around the sides, and a stairway on either end. We imagined that the upper levels of the stage were the everyday world and the lower levels were the underworld.

 The theme of this piece was based upon the looming possibility of a coming conscription of both young men and women to support the endless and unwinnable “war on terror”. I later appeared as a War Resister, reading a first hand account of imprisonment by a Vietnam-era Conscientious Objector. As I am doing this, my Double, played by Richard is dragged off by the UBUs into the shadow stage and made to undergo a strip search in silhouette.

As we approach the finale’ there is an enactment of the Abu Ghraib torture scenes, using straw puppets, and orchestrated by a dirge played by the ensemble of bass clarinet, soprano clarinet, flute, drums, piano and fire organ! It seemed somehow tragically ironic in tone, and expressed the horror that we all felt re: the events at that prison after its takeover by the Americans.

 In a final scene, which we called the Pieta, there is a re-appearance of the demon, who mockingly delivers straw figures  representing her children to the earth mother, whose huge disembodied hands reach down from above. Each of her three children fall back into the underworld where they are thrown into the fire by the psychotically dancing demon. 

Finally the demon offers a skeleton of her own child to the earth, placing it in the old woman’s hands.  The Old Woman raises the skeleton to the upper platform and forms a kind of Pieta.

Recorded Penderecki pieces, notably the “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima”, are used for the first scene and the last scene as a base for the fire organ and woodwinds.

* Jerome Lipani has been involved with  Dragon Dance Theatre for nine years.  He is  an activist, multi-media  artist and meditator.