WURF as Theatre-Spectacle


WURF
With Hi-Xposure for 'The Elastic Limit' Commisioned by the Theatre Centre's Body Geometry Series, 2000



I. The Acrobat Falls

Good evening ladies and gentlemen.

It is of course a great pleasure to be here tonight, and it is certainly a pleasant surprise that so many of you have attended to hear our little lecture on a subject dear to us, "The Elastic Limit". Thank you so much for attending, and without further ado, let me begin.

Let me begin with a paradigm. A paradigm is anything that has some sense of coherence or integrity, and thus identity. As such the word can be applied to any system, particularily living systems, including organisms, cultures, civilizations, ideologies, and even, individuals, individuals just like you and me. The survival of a paradigm requires some degree of internal fixity, a "fixity of the internal milieu" as it was called by the father of modern microbiology Claude Bernard. Later Walter Cannon coined this internal fixity "homeostasis". Homeostasis is the internal equilibrium, or stasis, required for an organism to survive.
In biological terminology, and in computer models simulating living systems, challenges to an organisms equilibrium or homeostasis are referred to as 'perturbations'. Now there are two different kinds of perturbations. A 'random perturbation' is an event or challenge that impacts on an organization's normal homeostasis, stretching it in some direction, but not beyond the range of the limits of its elasticity. In random perturbations the organizination passes through the original perturbation, snapping back to its original paradigm, its original coherence of functioning. A 'structural perturbation', on the other hand, is an event or challenge whose impact on an organisation is so great that it is stretched beyond its normal capacity, its stretched beyond its elastic limit, it's bent and pushed out of shape, the strings that held it aloft, held it together, distinguished and delimited its pattern of functioning, are cut loose. Its natural tensions and polarities are intensified to the breaking point, the elastic snaps, and the whole organisation comes adrift, spilling out of the nest of its homeostasis, its nest of knowing, its cycle of being, never to return to what it was, never to return,

In tension creation
In tension creation
In tension creation
The greatest tension, the greatest creation,
The greatest creation, the gravest danger,
Destruction is tension held taut beyond limitation.

Snake advances by vacillations along the ground,
Gyrefalcons wings beating up and down?

The fearsome fire white hot burning up,
White knuckled clenched fist gripped tight,
The teeth that grind in the night,
The parched strings screaming taut,
The bow pulled, quivering, arched,
Shivering back, bent to point of rent,
Seams burst, blast, break,
The final tie is severed,
All is separate,
And the acrobat,
Falls....


II. Enantiodromia

Enantiodromia
across the poles of a plumb bob
stretched across the seasons of a cycle
pulled out
and swung back
pendulating
round the fixed pole
of a gravity
proceeding towards.
Enantiodromia
proceeds forth
by gathering the momentum
of a pendulum
and pushing it forward
toward.
Enantiodromia
impetuous
translibrium towards
edging forward out of the skins of norms
wriggling betwixt, between,
along the line of either, or.


III. Leap of Faith

Here we are again:
is it the end or the beginning?
But betweeen the straight line of evolution
and the circle of revolution,
in a held tension,
is a gyre.
Suspended,
tethered taut,
between past and future,
between puppet and angel,
between gravity and grace.
Gathered into the torn tension
of momentum and calling
our cracked fragility
endures the stress, straining.

With what poised patient passion we must proceed across -
balancing an unscored ballet
an improvised dance -
with a terrible glance to the precipice
still we venture forth.

The journey of a single step begins with a thousand miles.