A Myth

INSIGHTS

Excerpts from an essay by philosopher and dramaturg Roel Meijvis.

A Myth is a musical performance with and in space. By means of sound, air, light, voice, cloth, breath, time and body, it examines the question of how we humans relate to our surroundings. What does it mean to be present? How do I relate to the world around me? What is the role of language, of myths and stories, in understanding that world? And are other ways of relating possible? 

‘It fills us. We arrange it. It decays. We re-arrange it, and decay ourselves.’
Rainer Maria Rilke


1.

For the premiere at the O. Festival in Rotterdam, we find ourselves in a 12-metre-high former grain storage, called the cathedral; a large concrete space that feels unwelcome and cold. The space has something closed and heavy, like a bunker, a hiding place, but without the warm intimacy of a hut in the attic. It is a place that is not meant for people, and that you can feel.

Outside, it is light. Outside, life goes on. But here, we are in another world. The fact that grain has not been stored here for a long time indicates that time has passed. We are in a ruin, a remnant of a time and a world that no longer exists. This coming and going of worlds, this cyclical succession of gods, eras and seasons, is a characteristic of many mythological stories. 

These stories are our primeval stories about existence; about the beginning (and often also the end) of everything. In these stories, people often precede gods, and gods themselves often precede titanic primal forces or cosmic energies. In the beginning, there is nothing. But nothing is always at the same time everything. Later does unity become multiplicity, eternity a moment and life itself a living thing, an individual. Then you are suddenly somewhere. But where?

And so we enter this dark space, carefully, with slow steps and pricked ears. We hear something in the distance. Or is it close by? I choose a spot and remain standing. Here I try to see what I hear, and to hear where I am. Slow tones stretch out before me like a landscape from which a new mountain rises with every sound. Figures emerge from the darkness, respond to the call from the deep. A world awakens. Unique voices – are they voices? – human and inhuman at the same time, are outlined in the sound that was once one. I am able to distinguish more and more from each other. I search, I grasp, I arrange. But does this help me to be present?

2.

A Myth examines relationship and relating. The role of the spectator is essential to this. And so is my role as spectator, for how do I relate to all this? In what way am I part of this work or experience?

We see a figure moving through the musical landscape, curious. She too seems to wonder where she is. Together we encounter a world that is closed, but not hostile. We try to grasp it, understand it, be part of it. But is that possible? And how? […]

We are born into the world on the day we come to earth, but we are also born out of the world when we develop a sense of self that distinguishes us from the things around us.

How do these two fit together? Is something lost with this second birth? And is it possible to go back? Not to a romantic ‘state of nature’, but to a unity, a fullness, in which I experience the wind in the world as breath in me, and my breath as an extension of myself in the world, with which I mingle with everything and everyone.

Breath and wind are important motifs in this performance, as they are in the work of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. With these concepts, Rilke always refers to our participation in the unity and fullness of the world. When we breathe in, we take from it, and when we breathe out, we give space back. In this way, we create space. But it is also something that happens unconsciously, without thinking about it. Breath is the absolute source. The Hebrew word Ruach (רוח) from the Bible can therefore simultaneously mean breath, air, and (God’s) spirit. It is a movement of air, a manifestation of the world in its purest form.

3.

Is A Myth actually about language? Is language, and everything that comes with it, our primary relationship to the world? Is perception always a form of reading, understanding and interpreting? And what kind of grammar and logics does that perception adhere to? ‘Language is the house of being’, writes the German philosopher Martin Heidegger in his Letter on Humanism (1947). ‘In its home human beings dwell.’ On the other hand, that house is a so-called ‘second home’. Can that house really be a home? Is there room for everyone? And is there a possibility for man to leave that house? Are there still places free of myths? Spaces free of meaning and message? Do deserts still exist? And is that perhaps what is being sought in this performance?

In his standard work Mythologies (1957), the French philosopher Roland Barthes defines myth as speech, and in particular: a way of signifying, a form. It is a form of appropriating the world. By naming things we incorporate them into the human structure. A tree is a tree, he writes, but a tree seen with our cultural gaze has long since ceased to be just a tree. It is a decorated tree. We have a certain image and feeling about it, it refers to something, it is no longer a strange object that is silent.

4.

A hurricane of sound and movement rushes past us. ‘Fling the emptiness out of your arms/ into the spaces we breathe’, writes Rilke. It fills us. Like a wind that blurs the lines of my body and blows me to all corners of the space. The space I am, the space we are. A final attempt, and the feeling that something has been overcome.

Then, the silence after the storm. The descent after the climb. Relief. A new space, or: as new in space. And only now do we see where we really are – or, only now do I see that space that we think we indicate with that little word. Light. Height. Width. Here I am. Here we are.

It could be a beginning.