everything is everything and there is nothing else

Marc Lafia and the School of Propitiousness present:

Everything is Everything and There is Nothing Else 

An evening in 7 parts

Written, directed and narrated by Marc Lafia

A one night only performance

May 11, 2019, New York

Everything is Everything and There is Nothing Else 

This immersive installation and performance will be presented live for 1 evening in Brooklyn, New York before it goes on tour to Berlin, Shanghai, Tel Aviv, and Mexico City. Everything is Everything and There is Nothing Else presents, in the guise of a travel memoir, the ancient Greeks as they moved, and we continue to, from the ecstatic to reason, and from the mythopoetic to logos. 

Accompanied with video projections, haptic suits, AI, virtual hot tubs, an ambient electronic surround environment, video projections, feedback and recursion, this visual and aural performance asks us to once again consider our bodies, our being, our universe, the ecstatic, and the one and only life that is ours.

Ἀσπάζομαι,

Marc Lafia and the School of Propitiousness

The Text and Score

The Text that you hear recorded and scored has 4 main sections, broken out into 134 discrete entries including Athens (29), Islands (41) Greece (40) and The Peloponnese (24).  It is written as a visual and aural performance to be accompanied with video projections, haptic suits, holograms, AI, hot tubs, an ambient electronic surround environment, teletype, projection, feedback, and recursion - all that turns on initiation, communion, confession, the ecstatic.

It is a variable and modular performance theatre piece in the guise of a travel memoir that re-reads and re-presents the ancient Greeks as they move from the ecstatic or the instinctual, to reason, and from mythos to logos. Over time through lighting and staging, we realize the 'narrator' and the chorus are inside a kind of experiment, or being observed. We sense the narrator is in search of the Godhead as are those observing him - her or whomever speaks, or however the text of the piece is spoken and enacted.

It is written as a visual and aural performance accompanied by a variety of performers, Butoh, Mask and Movement Performers, various electronics, haptic suits and holograms, installation design, and projections.

The Idea

Perhaps there is no more pressing issue today than exile. Be it due to geopolitics, climate change, economic displacement, the expression of identity and religious belief, all of these factors are creating a great dispersion of peoples across the globe. With this, we ask ourselves, who belongs and to what, what is the local, what is the global, who am I, what do I stand for, and what do I fight for. These questions are not new. But the complexity of them can overwhelm us, especially as we become increasingly intermeshed with artificial intelligence, surveillance capital, deep fakes and impending climate catastrophe.

These thresholds or liminal points have been negotiated before, and I discovered that in my travels to Greece and time spent in Athens. Having worked as a visual artist and filmmaker, I came to think the form for this work would have to be the theatre. That very same theatre where the ancient Greeks could ask these very same questions.

And so, I came to think of presenting the history of ‘me,’ the concept of the individual, the self, the ego, the non-ego, the mystic, the fool, the brilliant, the ridiculous, the psychedelic, the priestess, the schizo and sorcerer, the engineer, the body, the earth, the stars, the sea and wind, geology and astrology, death and the afterlife, saints and criminals, Socrates as Morrissey, Nietzsche’s love of Spinoza, the politics of bodies, social bodies, socialized bodies, RD Laing tripping with Socrates who would take LSD and not the hemlock. It got me to think of excessive love, excessive lament and grief, ascetics, the divine, migrants, migrations, billionaires, all kinds of exiles and abjections, of joy and the consciousness of laughter and tears, the singularity and the many foreboding tales of the apocalyptic, historic time and mythic time and on and on and on. All of these ruminations and stories I wrote following the path of my travels and the real places we had been, what I came to see as a kind of pilgrimage to the Oracle of Delphi and our visit to Epidavrus, the ancient healing site of the Greeks, a place I imagined akin to Fellini’s Juliette of the Spirits.

I want in this work to give a history of the consciousness of the inner and socially constructed subject of the I, the ego, the individual and its dissolution and disavow meditating on the union of the two artistic powers - Dionysian rapture and the Apollonian ideals of the distinct individual - a relation Nietzsche thought of as a mystery and a relation and tension that continues today. Where are we, how do we go, where are we going.

Everything is Everything and There is Nothing Else presents, in the guise of a travel memoir, the ancient Greeks as they moved, and we continue to, from the ecstatic to reason, and from the mythopoetic to logos, from the local or tribal to the cosmopolitan, to ask for what can be an ethic for living today, what is the just and what is the good and how can be build a collective agency to take on today.

The Performance Installation
Everything is Everything and There is Nothing Else was created as an art installation performance film. The work was recorded with a live audience of 90 people on May 11th, in New York, at Nowhere Studios.

As an installation for a museum, kunsthalle, biennale, ancient or contemporary theatre or gallery, the work includes its designed environment or installation with the three screens of synch video playing the four hour performance.

At the same time the work is open to be performed again.

The variable and modular performance brought together 100’s of image essays, numerous drawings, large canvases, photo collages, fabric works, sculptural shrines, and videos to create an and an immersive installation environment with 4 rooms or zones in which Marc Lafia and 10 performers, including four Butoh dancers, four mask and movement performers and two chorus members presented a 4 hour real time performance work on the history of consciousness and the cognitive remapping of subjectivity, of the real and virtual politics of power, sovereignty, wealth and divinity.

Taking the ancient Greeks and his recent travels there as his starting point, he writes;

Last summer we (my two teen children and wife) went to Athens and fell in love with it. After 6 weeks of traveling to various islands we were convinced we would buy an apartment in Athens and make it our new home. It got me to think about what it would be like to be an exile, to be without home, to ask what is home, one’s language, habits and customs.

When we returned home to New York I started writing about the trip. It grew inside me getting richer and richer. It grew, because for the first time in writing one of these pieces, I wrote it following the route of our travels, as a kind of travel journal.

I wrote it from the point of view of me and my experience with my family and my reading and thoughts that folded and drifted and wafted in out and out and along those recollections of the places we visited, the people we met, the landscape, the history, the contemporary.

On May 11th, in New York we presented the work to a live audience wherein 90 entries of the text (recorded and sound designed over the course of 6 months) selected from the 134 discrete entries including Athens (29), Islands (41) Greece (40) and The Peloponnese (24) were performed. The performance and installation was accompanied with video projections, haptic suits, AI, virtual hot tubs, an ambient electronic light surround environment, teletype, video projections, feedback and recursion, audience engagement, all of it turning on initiation, communion, confession and the ecstatic.

The work re-reads and re-presents the ancient Greeks as they move from the ecstatic or the instinctual, to reason, and from mythos to logos. Over time we realize the 'narrator' and the chorus are inside a kind of experiment, or being observed. The narrator is in search of the Godhead as are those observing him .

As per the notation for the work, the number of performers is variable, as is the length of the performance, and design. For the New York performance, there were four Butoh dancers, four mask and movement performers and two chorus members.

The Butoh and Mask performers opened an entire dimension to the work, truly those many things that exceed language, those intimations that only the body and gesture can express and suggest.

With myself, the chorus and these eight performers, we now had eleven people to be on stage.

The principal silent narrative action on stage seen while hearing pre-recorded text, would be the storm of Folegandros that has overtaken me, the dematerialization of me with increasing amplified and invasive AI, these storms in me and with that an oedipal murder, wherein Roman, my 13-year old son (established as my son early in the piece through travel videos and family photographs), would storm onto the stage, and take the magic orb (control and immortality), which was protected and controlled by, of course, the DJ and sound designer and google scientist. Roman comes onstage from having been seated with his mother in the audience, seizes the glowing red orb and with it takes ’control’ of the sound-meme scape, changing it to play his radical anthem, “You don’t know the program that’s controlling you, you are a meat bop remote controlled by corporate elites.” He then, in the midst of a ceremonial party of his father, the narrator, shoots and assassinates him. The narrator is embalmed and ceremonially taken to the Red Temple and from there journeys into the afterlife through the Western lands (depicted or tangentially enacted by the Butoh, movement and masked performers. All the while hundreds of still images resonate themes of revolt, control, societal order and disorder, the fragmented mind and ego, gods and goddesses, the divine…) On his journey the narrator is rematerialized and recreated by the chorus as an immaterial upload becoming the singularity AI of the future.

It’s these two lines, the pre-recorded scored and narrative text of thoughts and reflections of my actual travel itinerary including many photographs and videos of the actual places, inside a cascade of hundreds and hundreds of curated projected images and videos, within which the performers enacted the narrative I have described above.

I want in this work to give a history of the consciousness of the inner and socially constructed subject of the I, the ego, the individual and its dissolution and disavow meditating on the union of the two artistic powers - Dionysian rapture and the Apollonian ideals of the distinct individual - a relation Nietzsche thought of as a mystery and a relation and tension that continues today. Where are we, how do we go, where are we going.

Note on the Performance

As a rule, the number of performers is variable, as is the length of the performance and the design. The work turns on the notion of recording, and the extension of ourselves into multiple media and our very own bodies as media. There are many levels and media throughout the piece - multiple projections, slide shows, music, sound - all of which informs how it is to be presented and where and how performance figures into the work.

Because of the voluminous text the narrator is, at times, a lecturer and story teller, unable to read from notes, and at others, observed in an experiment, by a chorus of sorts - google scientists at the Esalen Institute are reading the narrator, measuring him (her), observing him, and putting him through various rituals and enactments.  And all the while, the unconscious of the narrator is given expression through Butoh dancers, mask performers, movement performers, and a number of electronics. It is a collision of the mythic and the unconscious with reason, rationality, and instrumentality.

A key to understanding the piece is not only the notion of the exile, but tied to this, the reality of ‘Greece’ aspiring to and becoming an imperium, an empire, (in the 5th century bc) and wrestling with defining who is a Greek, what is to be a Hellene, who is in The Imperium and with what status. This ranking and categorization of people we know is repeated all through human civilization and history. ‘Greece’ as an empire was never quite an empire, but a way to take up the world. It was extraordinary for a while, but like many other empires ultimately failed and was colonized.

There is a great deal at present that we can learn from the pre and post socratic greeks: the tension and conflicts of who is inside and who is outside, who is the other, who is me (a constant question in Greek Tragedy) and the longing, in our desires to transform our inner selves, wishing to understand life beyond country, language, life itself and the afterlife. The vanity, seduction and aphrodisiac of wealth and power, history, reason, community, all these things are immediately recognizable to us.

An Evening in 7 Parts

1.

Atmosphere 

2.

Athens

3.

Interlude

4.

Islands

5.

Interlude

6.

Godhead

7.

Escape Velocity

Cast & Crew

Elliot Arkin, Statuary

Christian Andrews, Set Camera

Will Atkins, Butoh Dancer

Reza Behjat, Lighting

Sindy Butz, Butoh Dancer

James Burgin, Movement Performer

Marcus Burnett, Performance Camera

Nikki Burnett, Still Photographer

Sindy Butz, Butoh Dancer

Ochion Jewell, Musician

Howie Kenty, Musician

Yvette King, Sapho + Chorus

Ellen Ko, Movement Performer

Marc Lafia, Narrator, Mystic Fool

Andreea Mincic, Set Design, Costume

Ayodamola Okunseinde, Chorus

Ana Guzmán, Movement Performer

Chad Raines, Sound Design, Composition

Monica Sanborn, Movement Performer

Luke Shwartz, Musician

Azumi Oe, Butoh Dancer

Gil Sperling, Projections

Margherita Tisato, Butoh Dancer

Shelley Wyant, Mask Director

Reviews
“A mind spa.  inspirited by Ken Kesey, Margaret Atwood, & Mr. Rogers.
A hypnotic narrative with cleansing lucidity; flourishes of anthropological & philosophical questions graciously poised, leading every so often to a provocative declaration: “we are individuals without individualism.”
during the hour long chaotic train ride home, i summoned marc’s soothing voice, its understated enthusiasm, its patience with sense-making; the gliding shadow people in silhouette... 
We want marc to buy that house in Athens. so we can go there. and listen to him tell us about the view. and its people. and our lives.
He IS the agent of mind control, i haven’t forgotten. It just so happens I wouldn’t mind falling asleep with him at the wheel. I suspect I’d wake up in a land of Terry-Gilliam-possibilities, in very good company."
Kat Mandeville, author, theorist

"The most wonderful time travel story. “Everything is Everything and There is Nothing Else” is an exercise in connecting dots that comes with having a few seasons under your belt. The magic of making the obvious. ...clear, gut checking ones own place in the universe. And acknowledging that the only reason you're here and thinking the way one does at this moment is because of what came before you... the same questions, successes and failures... are universal. The conclusion is if you're lucky there will only be more questions to come ... '
Matt Duncan, production designer

'Now I know, you are an absolute genius🙏🏾 thank you for that Marc, mind is completely blown away... congrats to you and you’re amazing team/family.'
Tracey Ryans, producer, curator

‘Wonderful experience! Beautiful and thought provoking! Unbelievable talent everywhere!!’
Dominique Bravo, producer, philanthropist

“‘Marc, I could listen to your voice for days!!! Absolutely gorgeous. Thank you."
Lior Rosenfeld, Philosopher

Audio Book for Everything is Everything and There is Nothing Else

audio