A multi-media creation for theatre inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's story THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER & informed by Hijikata Tatsumi's ANKOKU BUTO (The Dance of Utter Darkness).

This work pulls together so many divergent creative activities that it has been given its own category. It started as an attempt to make concrete an academic study (a Masters dissertation completed in 2002) entitled BUTOH: A CORPSE DESPERATELY STANDING: Influences of Literature upon Hijikata Tatsumi’s Ankoku Butoh. Although, primarily, my own work, two invaluable others aided in its creation.  Lorenz Penkler, musician, worked closely with me to put together the soundscape & Mark Thomas, visual artist, created The Director animations for the video. My thanks go to Ronin Films, Australia for permission to use short clips from their documentary video BUTOH: Piercing the Mask. Thanks also go to Sopor Aeternus for posing for photographs & allowing the use of pre-recorded material from the 'Spiral Traveller' album.  Below is an introductory essay on the piece, USHER Performance Text, the Usher Butoh-fu, notes on music, video, etc. Other images will be added shortly (some images & artworks from this work already appear throughout this website).

USHER:

 THE SEWING TOGETHER OF SKINS

(An experiment with Butoh) 

Designed both as a multi-media performance, and an exhibition of art works, USHER is, essentially, an elaborate experiment in the creative appropriation of a literary masterpiece and the transposition of the disciplines of plastic arts, media graphics, film, stage design, costuming, music and physical theatre under the auspices of the Butoh genre.  In the manner of Hijikata, USHER, and all of its separate components, have been allowed to come into being by following the process of words begetting image from which form is allowed generation, and backwards from form to image to word. Whether video image, music, painting, sculpture or choreographic move, this has been the mode of working - this, and staying close enough to hear the voices of the dead.  The inspiration from which it germinates is Edgar Allan Poe’s haunting and macabre tale The Fall of the House of Usher; the container in which all the disparate elements ferment is stirred by the influence of Butoh founder Hijikata Tatsumi. What is laboured over and birthed I call my own and name it: USHER.

This brief outlining is by no means fully comprehensive or even detailed, and many, many other thoughts and considerations, too numerable to mention, go along with the formulations of this project.  In order to give some form of contextualisation and indication of the processes inherent in its creation, however, some of the main principle elements are here summarised.

Although Poe was not a contemporary of Hijikata, creatively more cerebral than physical, of Western rather than Oriental descent, and seemingly very different in temperament, the choice of re-working one of his short stories in fusion with Hijikata’s innovations in dance/theatre is neither wholly arbitrary nor solely the result of personal idiosyncratic predilection.  Poe was embraced both by the Decadent and the Surrealist writers, painters and poets who, in their turn, were embraced by Hijikata, and a great debt, by many, is owed to his work.  Indeed, those cornerstones of Surrealism: Reverdy’s ”bringing together of distant realities“, Lautremont’s ”meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine“ and Takiguchi’s harmony of ”copper and a white rose“ all find precedent in Poe.  His short treatise, entitled On Imagination, was embryonic:

The pure Imagination chooses, from either Beauty or Deformity; only the most combinable things hitherto uncombined; the compound, as a general rule, partaking, in character, of beauty, or sublimity, in the ratio of the respective beauty or sublimity of things combined – which are themselves still to be considered as atomic – that is to say, as previous combinations. But, as often analogously happens in physical chemistry, so not unfrequently does it occur in this chemistry of the intellect, that the admixture of two elements results in a something that has nothing of the qualities of one of them, or even nothing of the qualities of either… Thus, the range of the Imagination is unlimited. Its materials extend throughout the universe. Even out of deformities it fabricates that Beauty which is at once its sole object and its inevitable test. But, in general, the richness or force of matters combined; the facility of discovering combinable novelties worth combining; and especially the absolute ‘chemical combination’ of the completed mass – are the particulars to be regarded in our estimate of Imagination. (Poe, A. E. ed. Galloway D., 1986)

Poe’s thoughts find correspondence in the works of the Decadent painters and poets, and are echoed and reverberated in the substratum of Surrealism in its seemingly choosing (and from the view of dream fabrics this may only be seemingly) of the most nonconsensual uncombinable ”things hitherto uncombined“.  Moreover, with the Decadents, Surrealists and their heirs, Poe’s preoccupations are given continuance.

Upon analysis, Hijikata’s work, more so than any of many of his contemporaneous associates, may be seen as having a direct correlation to Poe.  The multiplicity of ”hitherto uncombined“ elements of sublimity and beauty, along with the potency of shared obsessions, and the expression of these in their respective arts, forges a linkage strong enough to overshadow differences.  The sublime and the beautiful, death, resurrection, insanity, ecstasy, eroticism and violence, scrawled on paper or danced upon the boards, unite Poe and Hijikata.

The Fall of the House of Usher (1) was selected by virtue of it being an exemplary example of manifestation of all of these obsessions in one short, mysterious, psychological tale of horror, and in that it evidences an uncanny foreshadowing, by over a century (2), of the postmodern view of the self as fragmented, yet connected to, and part of, a wider whole, a world-at-large (3).  The main protagonist, Roderick Usher and his twin sister Madeline, the House and its landscape, the doctor and the friend etc. etc. are all fundamentally one and the same, yet fragmented, the irreconcilability of these fragments leading to eventual destruction despite a memory of unity. 

USHER, therefore, also deals with the same set of pre-occupations, obsessions, as those nurtured by Poe and Hijikata: with the instinctual, existential and experiential ground of being lying beneath the social, rational arena.

Both these artists were, in their day, descried as debauched, Hijikata, in particular, sourcing a scandalous shock wave, yet, at the beginning of the 21st century, it is hardly likely that USHER will illicit any outcry, moral indignation, or even ruffle anyone’s sense of propriety.  In the contemporary world of literature, art, film, music, theatre and performance, pre-occupations such as these are commonplace.   Furthermore, the postmodernist artist is freer to create works without the domination of cultural mores or niceties, and without expectation of an outcry should these be digressed, however overtly explicit and/or visceral.  This being so, USHER does not hanker after shock value but rather embraces the abject in a more subtle manner, more in line with Poe and Hijikata, than the many performances currently in vogue.  Blood is spilt upon the stage, but it is not bodily fluid, and under the glow of lighting the darkness is pitch black, if the spectator is brave enough to perceive it and tread the inward spiral downward.  For, although the principle performer repeatedly rises and falls, both physically and metaphorically, the crucial accentuation is upon descension and dismemberment.

The descent is one into a more primary mode of existence, dangerous, instinctual and sensuous, an underworld of dreams and the abyss of madness. Divisions collide and meld in hallucinogenic, surrealistic vision, imbued with sentience, disrupting logic and rationale in an assault upon both senses and consciousness.  No indication of meaning or moral is offered, no philosophy expounded, merely a suggestion that the work may contain such.  It is political in that it raises issues of social-cultural identity, individualism and gender, yet it remains free of dogmatism and peddles no political stance.  Certainly, what it is not is a straightforward translation of a short story into a theatrical performance, indeed, to many, the story will barely discernible.  On the surface it may seem that Poe’s story has been virtually disregarded, but this is not the case.  It has broken down, not to destroy it as a work, but to dislocate its fabric in order to select and relocate fragments in a new work that is considered as an appraisal of the original and as homage to the genius of its writer.

The tradition of transposing literary works to the stage, be it in the genres of opera, ballet or drama, invariably take the form of a close adherence to narrative.  USHER dispenses with this convention.  Under the influence of Hijikata, key elements are selected from the story, and, in like fashion with his own practice, it has been plundered for ”image gifts“, these then distilled with additional ingredients.   The performer is not an actor in the usual sense, not caught in character role, but is rather a body and this body is the sight of deconstruction; nothing more than a physical vessel to be emptied, to be made ”a corpse“ through which something greater flows. By virtue of this abnegation, and by the ambiguity inherent in presentation, identification with the performer or the performer’s role is denied.   Additionally, there is no climax in the usual sense and, veering away from linearity, the patterning is one that subtly doubles back in eternal looping.  Past, present and future merge.  The memories of the ”dim remembered story“ related by Poe’s protagonist Roderick Usher in the ballad The Haunted Palace are interwoven into a timeless now, compelling decay and death to join birth and life in the formation of cyclical motions.  The final image is an echo of the first, a call for begin again.  Time is that of ”the metempsychosic mode“. The process, as it appears in USHER is of undulating chaotic growth, sporadically interrupted, with no real or tangible beginning, middle, or end.

Intrinsically related to this metempsychosic mode is the play of metamorphosis, another vital component of Butoh, wherein the performer transforms from one thing into another with no logical measure of cause and effect.  This anti-individualistic fragmentation, suggestive of an interconnectedness, both actual and imaginary, is incorporated into the choreography of USHER, wherein the performer ‘becomes’ animate being, inanimate object, male, female, child, animal etc.  There is, at root, an antagonistic interplay of differentiation and non-differentiation. 

Hijikata’s work, as previously indicated, also places accent upon fragmentation, displacing the modernist’s view of the individual self as indivisible, and like Poe, emphasises its linkage and interconnectedness to the wider sphere.  Both stress fragmentations and bifurcations, whilst hinting at a kind of universal amalgamation, an interlaced sentient world where the individual ego is demolished, which may be considered mystical, pantheistic or shamanistic, as a regression to an infantile psychological state of omnipresence, or simply insanity.  Final fabrications, however, are left to the reader.  Meanings, or multiple meanings, are hinted at in Poe’s works, but are never overtly given.  In like fashion, Hijikata threw open the interpretations of his pieces to the spectator, inviting inventory participation (as do the many other Butoh performers who have inherited his legacy).   In a similar vein, USHER is a courting of the imaginal, an invitation for spontaneous analogous formulations, and as such, it will inevitably mirror something of the spectator.  The spectator, then, is also an active participant, part of, and integral to the rite.

The fact that Hijikata found stimulus from a whole plethora of arts outside of the confines of dance and allowed these to shape his dance, and Roderick Usher is represented as nurturing a wide range of artistic interests, gave the impetus to create USHER as a multi-faceted work in which a variety of different art forms combine in defiance of the staid strictures of compartmentalisation.  A hybridisation and an intimate juxtapositioning of the arts takes place in USHER.  Each of these separate facets has been specifically created for the performance, and has been inspired and informed by the Butoh genre, all coalescing on stage with choreographic stylistics derived from Butoh, re-translations of the rudiments of Poe’s tale and, in like vein to Hijikata, more personal memories from my own childhood (discarded dolls) assume archetypal significance.  Every element upon the stage is also a distinct work of art rather than a stage property in the sense of artificial contrivance.

The arrangement is kaleidoscopic, in certain instances appearing to form harmonic patternings, at others a seeming cacophony of chaotic fragmentation.  Music, video and stage action are not deliberately synchronised save at particular isolated points.  Often they run counter to each other, with timing out-of-tune and out-of-step, creating a disturbing deformation that emphasises the grotesque beauty of much of the imagery. 

The more visual aspects of USHER, the paintings, sculptures, video, animations, set, costuming and lighting, as well as the musical sound score, are not so much closely patterned in conformation with what has been done to date in Butoh, but takes Butoh into a new direction.  Although Butoh has inspired theatre practitioners to employ, in part, its aesthetics, and compelled a number of photographers and filmmakers to document it, extremely little work has been executed in the realms of the plastic arts, creative video or music proper, that could be described as having been directly stimulated by Butoh.  USHER, therefore, steps into unchartered territory.

Rather than pick up on the forms of plastic art that informed Hijikata, the impetus and inspiration, in this instance, come both from Poe’s tale and, unequivocally, from Butoh itself.  Certain keys thread together music, video, animations, staging, lighting, costuming, sculptures and paintings.  These keys, having been highlighted in the chapters of BUTOH: A CORPSE DESPERATELY STANDING (Influences of Literature upon Hijikata Tatsumi’s Ankoku Butoh), re-iterated and added to here, form the bedrock of Butoh and consequently of USHER.   There is an accent upon the body as an object, on metamorphosis, fragmentation, the subconscious, gender subversion, theatricality and composites of a paradoxical nature.  There is a nightmarish quality infused with a whimsicality, a sweetly slick and polish tinged with decay and raw crudity. There is an inversion, a descension.  There is much more that words can convey.

Although each of these components is an individual artwork/art object in itself, there is a sense in which they are not complete in themselves due to the very fact that they were created, not only as an experiment with Butoh inspired form, but because they were also specifically made for the USHER performance.   As such, they only begin to approach a semblance of completion when they come together in the auditorium, with each other, with the performer and with the spectator.  Not only do questions arise here as to what distinguishes artwork from theatre prop, but also as to the nature of process and product.  Could a series of products, not all temporal, created towards a specific goal be constituted as process? If so, then the postmodernists favouring of process over the modernists product would seem purely arbitrary in this case.

The USHER performance text is an abbreviated blue print designed to give a structural basis and provide a format for the ensuing creation of other elements, and much that constitutes the whole could not be included within its margins.  The text is neither self-contained or fixed, but more a contingent pre-performance text, perhaps even destined to fade and dissolve as the work is furthered (4). 

Two versions of the text were created: the first intended for four performers and the second for a solitary performer (5).  Although on paper there is little difference between the two texts, the consequent experience of performance, for both spectator and performer, would inevitably be quite dissimilar.  More subtly, in the first version, the players interact with each other, but in the second the solo performer interacts only with art objects.   All of the protagonists whether players or art objects, are merely fragments of one being, and the same applies to the on-stage video/animation projection, music and space: all are intrinsically linked.

On the first page of the performance text(s) is a slightly amended version of The Haunted Palace, the strange ballad played and sung by Roderick in Poe’s story.  Three of its verses have been very slightly amended for USHER. These verses are given here in their original form with amendments (bold in brackets) after the words that have been changed.

The quintessential change is, quite obviously, Pororphyrogene for Androgynene, and the subsequent references to Queen and King/them in place of the singular King/him.  This is a further anti- individualistic measure undermining gender identification. Such an undermining is one that is extensively utilised in Butoh, dancers often presenting themselves either as combinational male/female or void of gender altogether (6).  This cross-gendering/gender denial is also, as previously indicated, a subversive rite of reversal in which an upturning of the accepted order is established.  By making this amendment, the utopian vision at the beginning of the rhapsody is transformed to one of the reverse utopianism innate in Butoh aesthetics, and the crisis of USHER, likewise, rests upon the ”dim-remembered story“ ever present and upon the artifices with which it is overlain.  The nostalgia inherent in the ballad, is, therefore, as a consequence, brought more sharply into line with the nostalgia evidenced in Butoh: nostalgia for a beyond culture, actual and now.  Furthermore, the androgynene is both an ancient archetypal symbol for sexual union and erasure of individuality, a symbol par excellence of Sex and Death - a freedom from the 'discontinuity of being', to coin Bataille's phrase.

USHER is sectioned into six Sequences and a Prologue between which is inserted a beshimi kata (7) given by the performer and the flow of the video is interrupted by a piece of animation.  The interaction between video animation and performer here introduces a meta-theatrical device into the performance.   An actual ‘freeze’, or ‘mie’ as it is termed in the tradition of Kabuki, does not appear in Butoh due to the import lain upon constant motion and flux.  The beshimi kata, however, is a sort of equivalent and it may best be described as a grimace, or a convulsion, in which the features are contorted out of recognition in an attempt at dismantling the equation of face = individuality = identity.

Although the Sequences do fall into a natural cyclic order: pre-natal, birth, childhood, adolescence, youth, maturity and old age/ death, it is conceivable that they could also run backward  with no detriment to the essence of the work.   Each of these Sequences, are entitled with words or phrases lifted from Poe’s text, and as made visible through the animations, video and, in part, the lighting, they are vaguely colour coded by white and by rainbow hues (with blue and indigo in combination).   The rainbow arch, here, is an allusion to the cyclic - that is, doubled, echoed or shadowed by another arch within the earth and therefore without end denying the hope of a pot of gold: a serpent swallowing its own tale.

The white Sequence Zero entitled Shroud and following immediately after The Prologue, was stimulated by the description of a small painting in Poe’s story: a painting of an interior illuminated by a mysterious light.

A small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device. Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch, or other artificial source of light was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendour. (ibid.)

In USHER this has been interpreted both as the entrance to a burial chamber and as a birth canal and use is made of the auditorium itself, curtains, lighting and the rhythmic sound of breath and heartbeat to give hint of this.

The birth of Sequence One, ” the hideous dropping off of a veil“, is coloured purple and evokes the ” pestilent and mystic vapour“, the ”faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation“ that is described as hanging around the House.  The title given to this Sequence is From the Donjon-keep (tomb/womb).  Mirror of Sweet Echoes, a labelling that plays between the inverted image of the House seen in the tarn and the ”sweet echoes“ mentioned in The Haunted Palace, is designated green.  It is the Sequence of childhood and draws from the tale’s suggestion that once the land around the House of Usher was fertile.  Sequence Three, Mournful Burden, a phrase used in the story in reference to the body of Madeline, is blue and cold.  It indicates a skin  forged by the machinations of society and as ill-fitting as Roderick Usher's. The fourth Sequence entitled Vicintiy of the Storm, referencing the ”breath of the rising tempest“, the storm in the tale, is blood red.  Eroticism and death tear apart and unite the skins. The title of the fifth Sequence is taken from the quotation before the opening of the story: Son Coeur est un luth suspendus; Sitot qu on le il reone accredited to De Beranger, which translates: 'His heart was a suspended lute; pluck it and it will resound'.  This Sequence, a dream, is warm orange and is a ludicrous wedding governed by societal norms - a pastiche.  On another level it is the Sacred Alchemical Marriage, the Self and anima/animus uniting. The final Sequence, Winged Odour  ‘neath a Lurid Tarn, a compound of elements  taken from The Haunted Palace rhapsody ”radiant palace“ and ”banners yellow, glorious, golden“ and the last words of the tale ”and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘House of Usher’“  and is golden followed by black  An exquisite memory flows through the principal performer before returning to ‘the donjon-keep/womb/tomb’. The spectator also returns, plunged into darkness with only the sound of a heartbeat, to the point at which the show started.

USHER, though it deconstructs and fractures, is, at the same time, both a seeming evocation of a primitive, pre-symbolic, pre-‘Babel’ world, an illusionary conjuring of a world where the divisions between words and things has not yet come to be, and, also, an actual one.  The shadow it casts is generated from the space between mind and material, word and thing, dancer, object and participatory receiver/spectator.

There is no audible dialogue, or spoken text in USHER, yet, words are there in the performance.  They are the precursors of images, written upon the performers body, incorporated in the pre-recorded sound score, form the bedrock from which the work has developed and have, to a great degree, also guided its course (8).  The beginning point of the project was Poe’s tale leading to the creation of a performance text that was informed by the words of both Hijikata and Poe, that is, instructed by the dead in a literal sense (and also by my own 'dead brother' (reservoirs of memory)).  The elements of video, painting, sculpture, film, music and dance cannot erase these words.  The lingual and the pre-lingual co-exist, create a tension, split apart and, paradoxically, reunite.

As with many Butoh performances, the opening of USHER is deliberately slow of pace. This exaggeration of duration and tension is designed to heighten awareness and put the spectator into a felicitous and receptive state (9)

As stated, all movement in USHER is choreographed.  The choreography is essentially based in Butoh aesthetic and dance technique, derived from Hijikata's Butoh fu, from my own created Butoh fu and is spawned from practical instruction given directly to me by some of the most well respected Butoh performers in the world.  Amongst these have been Amagatsu Ushio (the founder and leader of Sankai Juku) and Murobushi Ko, both of whom were trained by Hijikata and were one-time members of Dai Ruda kuda Khan, and Endo Tadashi, who has collaborated for many years with Kazuo Ohno.

USHER is the antithesis of, and runs counter to, the criteria and rules for the 'well-made play’.  As a piece of multi-media theatre it seeks to elevate, excite and affect by assaulting the senses with auditory and visual stimulus, by its choreographic physicality, the nature of its subject matter, by the interaction of its multifarious components, and by its discords and harmonies.  The ideal would be the infection of the spectator with Roderick Usher’s ”morbid acuteness of the senses“ and to initiate what Poe termed a ”terror of the soul“.  But, not in an attempt at delineation this ”soul“, nor to make intimations of things ”eternal“, or even to provoke cathartic illumination, but to eject spectator and performer alike into the ever-present now of ”a corpse desperately standing“.

In that Usher is experimental, I am reticent about stating that it is wholly complete, considering it to be more a stage of a journey rather than a conclusive outcome or final arrival.  Nevertheless, it is hoped it will, indeed, impinge upon the psyches and sensory perceptions of others, although it is acknowledged that such an impingement relies as much upon the individual recipitent/spectator as it does upon the creator/director or performer.  That USHER deliberately provides space for this to occur does not necessarily mean that it will, just as a reading of Poe’s tale does not guarantee every reader will experience a tremor.

NOTES:

1.  Other artists have been inspired to create works from this particular tale.  Debussy cherished the idea of basing an opera on it, but died before its completion.  Jean Epstien was the first to make a cinematic version in 1928, followed by Ivan Barnett in 1950, Roger Corman in 1960 and Harry Allen Powers in 1990 (the latter two being crass in the extreme). Stephen Berkoff created an adaptation of it for the stage in 1974 and Peter Hammill finally released a recording of an operatic version in 1999, having begun work on it as early as 1973.

2.  The story was first published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, 1838, and later the same year in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.

3. Frederick Jameson in a paper on postmodernism states that a ”shift in the dynamics of cultural pathology can be characterised as one in which the alienation of the subject is displaced by the fragmentation of the subject“. As a consequence the signifying chain breaks down and a temporal unification of past and future, inner and outer.  (Jameson, F., 1984).

4.  Nonetheless, the original text may be considered as a work of art in its own right for it has been formatted to design and adorned with original photographs, Photoshop artwork and stills from the Usher video.

5.  Both versions are contained within the Appendices of the full work of which this is but  an extract.

6.  I once asked Amagatsu Ushio, leader of the Butoh dance troupe Sankai Juku, about his use of white make-up.  He explained that it was to render the dancer ”neutral“ in order ”that the dancer may become either male or female“, that is, to undergo a metamorphosis or flow into any form, that is, Hijikata's "corpse", "empty vessel". (Interview with author 23 Jan.1999).

7.  The term 'beshimi' was used in Kabuki and referenced a specific mask with a painted stylised grimace.

8.  The whisperings, incorporated in USHER: The Music, are readings of the USHER Performance Text and Poe’s Haunted Palace:  the articulation of words having been deliberately pushed back to inaudibility.

9. This, however, is not a technique peculiar to Butoh: it appears throughout the tradition of Japanese theatre and is particularly evidenced in Noh drama as jo-ha-kyu, a form of structural pacing and rhythm.  These prolonged openings in Butoh may be corresponded with the jo part of this structure, but in Butoh often there is an exaggeration of this duration and tension.

(The Performance Text for Four Players)

Duration: 1 hour without interval.

USHER, conceived and created by Eleanor Boyce, is a multi-media performance for theatre.  dance, painting, sculpture, video, lighting and music combine in a mise en scene in defiance of traditional categorisations of art, cutting across cultural boundaries, time and space to implant itself in a primordial/arhetypal universal ground.  Based upon, and freely adapted from Edgar Allan Poe's classic and haunting tale THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER,  it draws inspiration from the work Of Hijikata Tatsumi, founding father of the Butoh movement.  All elements and all protagonists are merely fractured pieces of a kaleidoscopic whole that spirals into the abjected realms of insanity, eroticism, violence, ecstasy and death.  here the grotesque and the beautiful co-exist; harmony and discord, dream and reality, mingle without compromise.  All action and non-action takes place in a surrealistic space, an interior suggestive of both tomb and womb, behind the pale door of the House, the door being a light towards which it gropes..

THE PROTAGONISTS:

USHER: an androgynous being costumed in half white and half red.  Roderick  and Madeline combined; male and female respectively.

THE UNNAMED: Sentience/The ancient House of Usher, robed and veiled in black  Only hands, and on occasion, feet are shown to the audience.

THE TWINS: the two seperate halves of Usher. Male costumed in white, female in red.

THE STAGE SET:

The interior of the House; akin to a dark fairytale palace, a surrealist exhibition, a macabre nursery, yet strangely stark enclosure.  An 'end on' black space, black tattered curtains at the sides. A thin white zigzagged line is painted down the black back  wall and runs across the floor to the front of the stage space. Paintings and a soft sculpture are suspended from the lighting bars.   A large sculptured frame is hung likewise, enclosing a blank canvas to be utilised as a video screen (video to be projected throughout the performance).  A bizarre throne is placed off centre stage toward the left, with a marionette in the semblance of Usher placed beneath it and a gold metal crown behind it.  A large mirror is propped against the curtained wall of stage left. Two life-sized soft dummies, one white/male and one red/female, featureless save for exaggerated genitalia, are slumped back stage right.  Concealed within the genitalia of the female dummy is a dagger.

NOTE:

The music, video and stage action do not intentionally correspond in pace or image unless where categorically stated. The stage set is also an exhibition space for artwork, the audience being invited into the space to view the work more closely after the show.

Sequence Zero

SHROUD

The audience is seated and the auditorium is suddenly plunged into darkness.  After aproximately two minutes the curtains that veil the stage are heard to be very slowly opening.  Isolated pockets of concentrated light created by overhead spotlights, rise and fall in intensity then fade, one after another, randomly alighting small areas of the theatre and audience but excluding the stage area.  The sound of breathing, slow and rhythmical, synchronises with the lights.  After a duration, the pulsing lighting ceases and the on-stage video projection takes over, breathing continuing in conjunction with the on-screen image.  Slowly a dim light comes up, back stage centre. THE UNNAMED, in the pale eeriness of its glow, stands motionless.

... Animation ...

Sequence One

FROM THE DONJON-KEEP

... Music ... Video ... Action ...

THE UNNAMED begins to move, very, very slowly, almost imperceptibly, hands first, then twisting the body in grotesque and heaving convulsions. The light onstage gradually goes up to make the scene more visible. Legs wide, THE UNNAMED sways, sinks downward making curling and uncurling motions toward the floor.  From out of the black robe, USHER, encased in a gossamer membrane-like sac, is birthed.  THE UNNAMED very slowly retreats to the back wall and is lost in shadow.  USHER, veiled and attached by a simulated umbilical cord to THE UNNAMED, twists, slithers, struggles to centre stage.  USHER claws, tears at the chrysalis-like sac, finally shredding it to pieces.  The sac is discarded, but the cord connecting USHER to THE UNNAMED remains unsevered.  USHER pants and quivers, moves jelly-like in a discovery of limbs ... then lies motionless.

... Action Freeze ... Animation ...

Sequence Two

MIRROR OF SWEET ECHOES

... Music ... Video ... Action ...

USHER begins to stir, to strive, rolls over onto hands and knees.  The spine is arched and stretched.  USHER crawls, multi-directional with intermittent stopping and stretching, then moving backawards, forwards, sideways, circling the space, alternating between beast and human.  Usher attempts to stand, falls, attempts to stand again, falls again, repeatedly before balancing upon two legs.  USHER clowns, dances, somersaults, rolls around the stage space, interacts with objects, pulls faces in a mirror, sits upon the throne, finds the marionette, makes it dance, lets it fall, looks around, spots the dummies.  USHER runs, skips, gathers them up in arms, brings them to centre stage, embaces and dances with them. 

... Action Freeze ... Animation ...

Sequence Three

MOURNFUL BURDEN

... Music ... Video ... Action ...

USHER becomes increasingly perplexed, disturbed, looks to one dummy and then the other and tries to throw them off but they seem attached.  USHER becomes scared, more determined and the dummies are finally freed.  The red one is flung to land centre stage right, the white one to centre stage left.  USHER stands shaking.  The stage darkens.  USHER sinks down, kneeling, crawling, rolling around the space, heaves and gesticulates exaggeratedly in despair.  Meanwhile, THE UNNAMED slowly rises and moves down stage.  THE UNNAMED attempts to wind, coil, tangle, USHER in the umbilical cord.  USHER fights.  The two engage in a dance of pursuance and flight, a tug o' war, before both players come to standstill staring at each other.  THE UNNAMED slowly retreats to back of the stage and disapears in its shadow.  USHER falls to hands and knees.  Screams, almost drowning the music, stretches, arches spine, crawls, moves around the space, backwards, forwards sideways, faster than before, part beast, part human.  USHER twists, rises to feet , clasps head, and stands swaying, centre stage front.

... Action Freeze ... Animation ...

Sequence Four

VICINITY OF THE STORM

... Music ... Video ... Action ...

USHER turns, red side to the audience, slowly approaches white dummy whilst erotically stroking own body.  USHER simulates sex act with dummy.  White side showing to the audience, USHER crosses stage slowly, erotically, and simulates sex with red dummy.  Screams.  Red and white strobes flash.  USHER shakes, becomes frenzied, pulls out a dagger hidden within the genitalia of the red dummy and wildly stabs it before violently casting it aside.  USHER turns, runs, dances fitfully across the stage, stabs the white dummy and casts aside in the same manner.  Collapses to the floor.  Strobes cease, the space becomes darkened.  USHER, panting, painfully and very slowly crawls across the floor to centre stage and curls up in sleep.

... Action Freeze ... Animation ...

Sequence Five

HEART - A SUSPENDED LUTE

... Music ... Video ... Action ...

THE TWINS enter from back stage left and back stage right respectively.  Movement is slow, awkward as they walk toward each other.  As they meet the red twin curtseys and the white bows.  They take each others hand and perform a grotesque series of bizarre medieval court dances.  The stiffness and awkwardness gradually dissapearing and movement becoming more graceful.  They embrace, coil around each other and fall like one flower to the floor. 

... Action Freeze ... Animation ...

Sequence Six

WING'ED ODOUR 'NEATH A LURID TARN

... Music ... Video ... Action ...

USHER uncurls, rises, serpent-like,  to standing, and begins a slow, graceful dance, a slight smile upon the lips.  Stage fills with a golden light.  USHER dance-walks towards the throne, sits upon it and continues the dance with upper body only.  Meanwhile, THE UNNAMED glides from the shadows and slowly moves to stand at the back of the throne. THE UNNAMED stoops, picks up the crown, encircles the throne to kneel before USHER.  Then  places the crown upon the head of USHER, rises to stand  and slowly dance-walks to centre stage and stands still.  USHER continues to upper-body dance for a while, before the smile turns to a grimace.  The space darkens.  Slumping forward, the crown falls with a clang to the floor.  USHER withers, crumbles, slips off the throne to the floor.  Dances on back, foetus like, crawls on belly toward THE UNNAMED.  THE UNNAMED squats, legs wide.  USHER is absorbed back into the folds of cloth.  The video fades. Lights very, very gradually, begin to fade to leave the stage and auditorium in utter darkness.  A few heartbeats are sounded, then ... silence.

- END -

A FEW STILLS FROM

THE USHER VIDEO

Conceived & created by Eleanor Boyce

'THE DIRECTOR'

Animations conceived by Eleanor Boyce created by Mark Thomas

THE VIDEO SEQUENCES

USHER Butoh-fu

1

The lurid tarn, still and black.

Feet set in clay.

A white stump of decaying tree.

Something stirs at an extremity.

A tendril moves toward a place unseen,

Then another.

A pestilent vapour rises and falls rthythmically,

At first almost hardly palpable,

Then, wave-like, walks the earth.

Curling, contracting, descending.

2

A barely perceptible fissure

Through which light shines.

A fistful of daggers

Gouge lines in a curtain of flesh.

Bloodied fingers, banners glorious,

Herald a liquid dawn.

A thousand crazy birds

Flap and screech.

Prodded, a jelly-bubble rolls and tumbles,

Splits in a sea of bone.

A fish stranded upon a shore

Gasps for air.

3

The siren sounds in silence

From muscles of steel and sinews of tin.

A sack of skin turns and furs over,

Paws at the barren ground.

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

In the forests of the night.

A vault, a tomb, a womb,

A Gothic archway, a palace door,

Stare, stare with red-litten eye,

But smile no more.

4

A drunken corpse

Staggers on stilts and falls.

A peony sways in the breeze -

Sweet echo of a burrowing white worm.

5

The child holds a bright windmill.

Running in happy valley, encircling the moon.

Jump, hop, skip, turn around.

The face in the mirror is a dead Jap.

A half-marionette walks toward a precipice.

Tongues curl and mouths salivate

And criminal daisies walk in chains.

Abandoned dolls rise to an embrace,

Secrete a sticky slime,

Then seperate,

Discarded by a hand that made them.

6

Insipid whispers course through veins

And a gloved hand twists the heart.

Organs are labelled, torn apart,

Slap, slam on a slab of marble.

A surgeon makes an effigy;

But another skin, unfashioned, unmade, walks,

Articulating something dimly remembered

Through severed nerve-endings.

7

The inmate of the asylum trembles

As the roar of the storm

Rumbles in the stomach.

A wave brings forth one ant, then two,

Then a great multitude scurry,

Hither and thither, thither and hither,

Through endless corridors of capillaries.

The plexus loops in figures of eight.

Inside a "woman with electric hair."

8

The thunder rolls

And the beast breaks upon the shore.

Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been?

9

"A neurology ward.

Where are you going?

The flower of epilepsy blooms.

Total infection of body and space,

An incident at a mental institution follows:

A mad woman appears.

The walls and air of the room are insane.

What are you doing?

Her behaviour and sensitivity have become

frightenenly precise

And she herself is now frightenly beautiful."

10

Bejewelled as lady of Moreau

Dancing a dance of seven veils

As a rainbow serpent eats its tail.

And she shall have his head.

11

The (k)night is a horse,

Wild and bright,

A unicorn masturbating,

Peircing the cavernous deep

With a break-asunder and torrent of rain.

12

Trist finds a treasure.

A scaly shape-shifting hermit

Beats stone on stone,

Puts nails in a coffin ...

One, two, three. four, eight ...

A bell tolls in a tower

And a mad boy walks on hot coals.

Cancel the alternative of brother or sister.

13

Guts, bowels, kidneys, spleen,

Spill and spread as black waters.

A three-legged creature

Struggles over a congeqled and lurid tarn,

Discharges a gaseous exhalation

To the hideous beating of her heart.

14

A fairytale in blood red and sperm white.

A prince and princess unite

In spastic communion.

A medieval romance

Of a courting corpses ballet.

A wedding knot tied in a ribbon of pus

And a noose of briar for a nuptial bed.

15

Vapours coil upward and a shadow sighs.

Softly, softly its tread upon the stair,

Crushing skulls beneath the feet.

Crowned, the Androgynene sits,

A belly full of sun and moon.

Fingertips emit rays to stoke distant shores.

16

Separate into discontinuity, continuity,

Barely perceptible, perceptible,

Integrate, disintergrate

Choke upon existence.

All chambers collapse inside the skin.

Slip to mud

And slide and slither snake in the grass,

To hidey-hole, to be swallowed by

Blanket of darkness.