Work in Progress- The Siren Project- Initial Images

So, some of my images from my Siren Project performance are starting to come in! I don't have everything yet, but I'm starting to work with some of what I have.

I was working with photographers and Kerry Rae and Hunter Plamondon, which was the first time I worked with professional photographers while doing a performance. Needless to say, it was a learning experience. Normally when I perform, I'm by myself, or I have a silent stand in who I entirely direct and who doesn't really move for the whole performance. Real photographers are NOT like that, so it was very different experience.

Normally when I perform I go somewhere mentally, a place that is not me, and when I return from there the real me has learned something applicable. I had a really hard time reaching that place while I was performing with people interacting. But I still learned some things and now when I'm looking back over the photographs, I am still able to grasp essences of what the performance was supposed to be about. I especially love the shots we took on my Holga 120mm film camera. They came out a lot less clear and more memory-like then than their digital counterparts.

The project is dealing with the dichotomy between male and female. The Sirens, women confined to their island and cursed (or blessed, depending on the legend) with wings, are the bringers of immortality through death. All men who sail too close to their island are so enraptured by their song of knowledge that they sail too close and dash their boats on the rocks. But the traditions predict that, as with the Sphinx, they would not survive the first man to resist them. Defeated, they would be seised by a self-destructive force powerful enough to have them commit suicide.

An interesting tale. The women offer the men knowledge with possible devastation, and if a man were to resist, the woman would then be worthless and fit for death.

Taking this concept I chose to reenact the situation of the myth. Building a nest, I wait for a male presence, and being resisted, I begin to self-deprecate and flagulate. Eventually my scene ends in death, but it is death with a hope.

According to Plutarch, there is a direct relation between the greek works to die and to be initiated. In most of the Eleusinian mysteries in fact, death was ritually invoked with a miming of the event, inevitably followed by cathartic rebirth. Possessing the secrets of the eternity, the initiated- as Sophocles explains- were freed of al anxiety.

These Holga shots are definitely verging on the feeling I was going for. I still have two more roles that have to come back from the lab, and I can't wait to see what they produce.

The digital images from Kerry Rae's camera have a very different feeling, but some of them I am definitely interested in working with.