Beginning 29 October 2021, ritual theatre artist and multi-talented esotericist Aoife Anastasia presents her Carnival of the Muses, a free-to-the-public, 10-day online festival of interdisciplinary arts events honoring the 9 classical muses with performance, ritual, interviews, and presentations by practitioner-scholars and multimedia artists. I'm delighted to have collaborated with Kahn & Selesnick on a devotional performance rite for Melpomene, muse of tragedy--with close connections to both Dionysos and Hercules (whose road trip with the cattle of Geryon we here in Gaul still also see and sense traces of in the mythopoetic landscape and place-names). On 31 October, A Rite for Melpomene will be presented online as a video piece, accompanied by a brief interviewish conversation between Aoife, Nicholas Kahn and myself.
The rite to Melpomene was filmed onsite in realtime ritualtime in several local sites in Brittany, and is accompanied by heavily treated (backwards, time-warped, upside down and inside out) samples of performances of classical Greek music known to us from fragments of ancient transcription: songs, chants, and invocations--for the Muses, the Bacchantes, funeral rites, and the river god Achelous (said to be the babydaddy of Melpomene's daughters, the Sirens). Nicholas Kahn especially sculpted some traditionalish Greek theatrical tragic masks with dried poppy seed cases for hairdos.
The music-sound aspect of the rite comes out of my own personal trance practice which began when, as a small child, I heard a Fundamentalist Christian preacher on television claim that messages from Satan could be heard if one played rock and roll records backwards--he made it all sound so exciting that I eagerly spun some albums in reverse hoping to hear some chilling, thrilling communications, but I was initially disappointed by a lack of any clear directives from the Devil. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed what happened when I played records backwards and, much better than receiving messages from the Devil, through this practice I really first became an artist, repeatedly experimenting with a medium and making decisions to express and experience--what I might now describe as a sort of private, homemade outsider artist ambient music/sound healing art. For a number of years I used this music practice as a gateway to trance and journeying. As a child I especially enjoyed working with ancient Greek music, classical Koto and Kabuki music of Japan, and songs of humpback whales, all of which I checked out as vinyl LPs from the Monroe County Public Library of Bloomington, Indiana.
Aoife's Carnival features a slew of very interesting folks each assigned to or claimed by a particular muse, including Thea Wirsching, Camelia Elias, and Alessandra Belloni
Click here to receive your ticket:
https://carnivalofthemuses.com/KahnSelsnick