WURF, a sonic theatre spectacle and installation-in-progress, was conceived out of a poem written some fifteen years ago.
The poem is entitled 'Cocoons':

Cocoons

The cocoons in which we are wrapped from birth,
swathed and concealed,
swaddled and wreathed within abstract heirlooms,
are like wombs which protect, preserve, secure,
but eventually
contain, condition,
regulate, restrain,
constrain, restrict,
constrict,
strangulate,
then finally entomb
the revelation of possibility,
until they become a catacomb
of unpenetrated eggshells.
Abortions.

After the metamorphosis is complete there is the final step of breaking out of the cocoon:
the acrophobic, after climbing, climbing the treacherous bamboo tower, discovers the flexible twine lying across the slats of the top platform, ties it to his feet, and secures the other end to the top of the tower. He did not know where the twine came from. He was uncertain as to exactly how long the length was. Now he must close his eyes and jump backwards...
The agerophobic walks into the desert...
The claustrophobic locks himself in a box...


The dancing, dangling marionette shears the strings...

So WURF was born, the puppet that cuts its strings.
The image lingered for years and was reborn subsequent to a number of years of academic oriented study revolving around the themes of 'addiction and consciousness'. The image of WURF, dangling by a thread, strung up and strung out, suggested the plight of the addict; a person whose strings are pulled by forces outside of themselves, wooden and inanimate. And yet WURF simultaneously suggested a pre-conscious being, blissed out, pre-natal, not having entered into the hard cutting world of consciousness where decisions have to be made, will mustered and put into action. WURF became a crucial symbol, a dialogical topos, for my ongoing reflections with regard to the relationship of grace and gravity. The puppet seemed to be a creature of grace, its orientation was upward, it rested on the ground only to simulate humans, creatures of the earth. This peregrination was strongly affirmed by the Heinrich Von Kleist's essay, 'The Puppet Theatre', who made an astonishing connection between the lives of angels and of puppets. Both were in fact far more graceful than humans - capable of the most astonishing acrobatic feats - their movements pendular, circular, unfettered by the limits so peculiar to creatures of gravity, whose movements seem so shambolical.

And yet its only humans that can love - and love can only exist in gravity - the world of suffering and absurdity, stupidity and violence, limitation and failure and vulnerability. And this love, despite the excruciating trials of the worlds in which it lives and has its dwelling, is worth sacrificing that blissful world of grace that the puppets and angels enjoy. In some ways WURF is very much like one of Wim Wenders angels - giving up grace because he literally "falls" in love.

WURF falls. To the ground, out of paradise, into the Land of Nod where he must learn to crawl and stand and walk. He crashes from bliss into helplessness in a moment - and in reality these two are only a shadow apart. Which brings us back to addiction. While you have your fix, whatever it is - I don't want to define addiction as being merely smack or alcohol or sex, it's literally anything that keeps a person or a society from realising their deepest talents and purposes and aspirations. As such addiction is something like a foundation of all civilisations, a kind of terrified evasion of certain kinds of realities - while you have your fix your in a state of bliss, but its a bliss that has no lasting power and as soon as its candle burns out you're way back out in the dark cold, somewhat worse off than before, and the face of something really terrible is emerging, and so there's a scramble for the fix which staves off that emergence, but which also seems to feed it. So bliss is really near to helplessness, and it has a relationship both to preconsciousness and to addiction.

In Tibetan Buddhist terminology there's a word,'Bardo', which has cropped up in my mind as a very suitable description for what happens to WURF the moment he cuts loose and falls. Traditionally 'Bardo' refers to the place a person who has just died finds themselves. It is a kind of no place where all the projects, and motives, and engines which called and drove a person are suddenly gone. Its a frightening place because everything you knew has vaporised, and really you have lost any idea of who you are at all. Traditionally this has been considered a somewhat dangerous passage because evil spirits can have considerable persuasive powers - there is a tremendous vulnerability associated with it and these Buddhists have devoted considerable energy to ensuring that the person who has recently passed away doesn't become lost. The idea of this danger is closely mimicked in one of the parables from the gospels where a man who has a demon driven out of him resembles an empty house which will be filled with seven new demons if it is not filled quickly with good spirits.

WURF, while cutting himself free from the ties that bind him, also cut himself off from that which bound him together. That which drove him and moved him was, however manipulative and senseless, that which defined him. He has cut himself completely away from his previous identity, torn himself out of his skin, thrown himself out a window of his known home. WURF, in fact, comes from the German 'gewurfenheit', which means literally 'throwness', the state of being thrown. So WURF is thrown out throws himself out of himself.