Part 3 - DARK LADY
THE MAKING OF DARK LADY
MOOD
Dark Lady emerged environmentally and narratively from subterranean stone structures. The 'tomb' or 'crypt' is her residence where she waits patiently, holding the seeds of our truths and untruths, our egos, our desires, whirling us into a cave of past, present and future, bringing us into an uncomfortable and precise intimacy with our subconscious fears and acquainting us with a confusing multiplicity of self. She cannot be denied. There is a natural death of the old. A struggle between the conscious and unconscious layers. She is the destroyer of illusions, empowering those to move forward, though if led down the wrong path, its shadow self could use its power to feed its own agendas. Once this challenge is taken, there is no going back. The midnight sun's shadow is unveiled and darkness makes its presence known.
MYTHOLOGY
Dark Lady came into being as an energetic force of Yin (cold, stillness, dark, fixed), an opposition to Sky Dance's Yang (heat, movement, light, waves and energy harvesting). An intrinsic part of our mythological mapping during the Augmented Organism Project incorporated various roots of European faery folklore. For Dark Lady, the characters and energies we worked with spoke to the environmental setting of this chapter. Further archetypal faery influences include:
Abe the Collector
Death
Lys of the Shadows
A Collective of Pixies
Gawtcha
G. Hobjah
Iris of the Rainbows
The Glanconez
The Soul Shrinker.
These energies involved calling on discernment from practitioners when aligning the real and the imaginary. Realization and manifestation of actions through awareness of old patterns and fears led to a breaking down of the structures of self— of transition and surrendering to the unknown.
The Dark Lady involves a necessary maturation phase of the Maiden, having seen all levels of reality from the underworld and beyond. Dark Lady represents, the shadow self, the pit of darkness where new seeds start to grow. It is not a negative place, but rather a vault within the spacetime that invites those who seek deeper understanding of their paths in the world to get intimate with themselves through experiencing different versions and mirrors of self. The energy and ritual of sacrifice is strong with the Dark Lady.
Further world mythology influences of this archetype include:
Pele, goddess of fire, wahine ʻai honua —earth eating woman. She holds a destructive and creative energy, coming from Kahiki and creating the Hawaiian island archipelago (Hawaiian reverence)
Inana/Istar, goddess connect with sexual love and warfare with an astral aspect in Venus. She is represented as a complex deity that is contradicting and paradoxical, and holds both masculine and feminine energies. One aspect she is commonly remembered is for her descent and return from the underworld, a death and renew of life as she transitioned through these two worlds.
Kali, goddess who removes the ego, liberates the soul from the physical cycle of life and death, holding destructive and creative energy. (Hindu reverence) Read more below on the ways Kali influenced the work.
Kali
Kali, the primordial goddess of the force of time and the changing transitions of nature that bring things to life or death (Kala masculine form). We were also inspired by the definition of kala, as one that can refer to black, dark color and destiny as a fixed point in time— a fate, a death. The goddess is seen as a protector and mother of the whole universe, as at the beginning there was only darkness and everything was created in darkness. The goddess has a destructive image, but is dedicated to preservation and balance of nature. She carries the signs on her third eye of the sun, moon and fire --the driving forces of nature.
In addition to our main research areas, our main elemental focus for Dark Lady was the moving beyond dualistic generalizations of light and dark, initially calling this section "Midnight Sun" due to the fact that the sun was shining bright in the sky at midnight, a time that most of the world associates with darkness.
PRODUCTION & PERFORMANCE PROCESS
Dark Lady and the element of the Midnight Sun, were a potent polar contrast to the ever present light and sun we experienced during our summer residency. We were aware that we were lacking the oppositional experience of the Finnish winter months of complete darkness, (a time of powerful Yin), so the only real experience of total darkness we had the whole month was in the underground basement of the Arteles residence in a mysterious and cold concrete cave. This basement formed the set for the shooting of the middle section of Dark Lady. The other setting of this chapter was filmed on location inside the installation Up and Under by Nancy Holt. Both of these environments greatly contrasted against the natural landscapes found in the rest of the work , carving out distinct , constructed spaces forged by the will of man. This naturally drew out themes of man vs. nature and the dawning of both the Industrial and subsequent Information Age. The week leading up to the Dark Lady shoots were emotionally intense. We were more than half way through our residency and our stamina was really tested. We also encountered a lot of young birds, some of them dead (fallen from grace, fallen from safety). Things became more emotionally heavy which was channeled into the work.
The most challenging part of this shoot was in the basement. It was unnaturally still, stale, cold, very very dark and the energy felt very suppressive, but the space was calling to unearth the shadow side. This site took the most production preparation and careful planning to open the space up safely for our work. Setting up the tech side of things included Cy programming strobes to synch with the audio. On the director’s side of things, Cy helped Jazmyne to prepare the character by: centering the energy, anchoring the intention of this section, and helping Jazmyne overcome some personal fears of vulnerability and releasing this shadow side into the room.
The general characterization, costume concepts, overall energy and effort of movement for Jazmyne's character was established from previous workshop developments and shared research but also included a now refined improv chemistry between director and performer. Most of the costume came from our shopping jaunt in Helsinki's amazing second hand and urban shops, paired with some things that Jazmyne brought over with her. The feather came in at the end to honor the death of the birds we encountered and ended up helping to solidify the image of the witchcraft and alchemy of the destroyer—with the power to focus that magic beyond judgements of good or evil.
As for the energy of the piece and the quality of movement, it was decided to focus heavily on very slow body movements with detailed body isolations and hits to generate a feeling of concentration, fluid focus and a premeditated procedure to the sorcerer’s potion. The basement energy and movement was intentionally jarring, unnatural, provocative, intimate and slightly uncomfortable—exactly as it was for us in the creation process.
EXCERPT FROM JAZMYNE'S CREATIVE JOURNAL
"I feel connected with the birds as they know the pathway to the skies, their wings draw figurative magic as we watch them defy gravity, sailing up, up, up and away from the weight that binds us to the earth...but Mama's magnetic energy brings them down, down to rest on her arms, and root into earth again. Birds are the watchers, overseers, our protectors. They are my protectors and I'd dearly hold their feather and flock with them together. TRUTH: A bird is sent into the mines to check the toxicity of air and its body is sacrificed. A bird is sent out as a messenger and is killed for the action of transferring bad news. Birds relay not only messages but signs in the skies, in our future, showing deforestation, weather change, storms on the front, global changes, unrest, and harm. They are sensitive beings -- their lungs and hearts as fragile as threads of feathers that hold them up. They overwatch the land, they die for us to protect from harms way, from curses, from hate, from toxic energies -- they warn us of what is to come. They are signs of peace and purity as white doves holding olive branches of wisdom. They are vowed as noble, sacred, of the gods, as their prized feathers decorate royal adornments. Plants migrate and grow in new lands because of them. They are carriers of seed, of growth, of abundance. They are the signal of land at sea. Their senses are distinctive, honed in on sensing far distances. Feeling into instinct they are navigators, the best explorers over distances of sea. R.I.P. to the three birds that are symbols of this transition, the cycle of death and life, to the darkness we must travel through to end out on the other side. "