SESSION #1

RUMMAGING THROUGH THE CHAOS FOR WORD-DISCORDANCE

September 27

RUMMAGING THROUGH THE CHAOS FOR WORD-DISCORDANCE

Somewhere inside a dry riverbed in the Barton Creek Greenbelt, 11 candle-lit people are writing poems.

Inside the collectively-invented sanctuary, the atmosphere was intimate. 11 people candle-lit in a dry riverbed. we split tangerines with each other and i led a meditation to start. then we started our ritual. 

we scattered our digital-items around the riverbed, each one playing a different sound. (people brought in audio from poems, ted talks, guided meditations, songs, etc. all at once, it was cacophony, but as you walked around, it became a gallery of sounds. 

we walked around the gallery taking notes, until i gave a sign that we would all collectively start winding the discordance down. each time you visited a sound after that sign, you had to lower the volume of it. it was up to you how much to lower it. we did so until we left one sound standing. unanimously & wordlessly agreed to be a ted talk about quantum physics & the question of why the universe mathematically exists, whether it is elegant or inelegant etc. 

then we all sat down & wrote in silence for fifteen minutes, harnessing our individual notes into a poem. 

before performing, i had us all read at the same time, the poems cascading like dominoes as i pointed to people. so one person would start reading, & three seconds or so later another would start, creating layers of sound. like this, everyone felt they read, & opened their voices up a bit to make room for the idea of fully performing. 

then we started our performances + music. only a few people there knew how to properly play the instruments, but we made noises regardless & it was truly beautiful. we had a cajon, some guitars, my accordion, some shakers, some bells, a guiro. people stood on top of a boulder & read, while we all swelled with the music. the only rule for performances being you can't give any precursors or post-cursors. the poems were crazy (good). they all resonated with each other wonderfully, having been made from the same material, but they were all so different still. 

after our performances, people still didn't want to leave, thank god, so i opened up some space for them to share anything else they'd been working on lately. this was more of a campfire atmosphere. we sat on the ground & sang songs & poems. 

the moon was a little sliver through the trees. & there were crickets everywhere. 

i made it back to my car by midnight (after lugging a cartful of instruments down this rocky 10 min hike, the accordion occasionally singing a bit, raspy)