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Johnny Dolphin is the co-founder of Theatre
of All Possibilities. He has written or translated thirty-five plays
and teaches performance. He also performs several times a year,
reading his poetry with dancers and musicians as Johnny & the
Dolphins.
"There is a man who has made his dreams happen." Paris,
circa 1980, and that was the way Brion Gysin introduced me to Johnny
Dolphin. For a moment I had thought he was launching into an impromptu
narrative, but then I realized he was pointing someone out across
the salon, a sturdy-featured American in his middle years who seemed
possessed of an immense and rugged energy, gleaming delighted dancing
eyes looking like they may have seen their way through a sweat lodge
or two and a lot more in their time. Brion said he was an important
person.
A perpetual, goal-directed traveler through the leaking compartments
of the extraordinary timespace we inhabit, Dolphin, Brion said,
had invested a vast capital of experience of the energetic potential
of every field of phenomena -- electromagnetic interaction, the
red shifts of quasi-stellar radio sources, wheat acreage, systems
theory, resolute imagination and the speed of chemical reaction
as determined by solar activity special metals and special forces,
gravitic strains, parabolic reflectors and dervish zikr - attractions
of the planets and of railroads - meat packing, palaeontology, ecology
- (before there was Eden there was Biosphere 2; Dolphin inventor
and co-founder) - language, literature, social history and mythology,
the respective qualities of ayahuasca and flame tea, the transcendental
functions of the infinitesimal calculus and - STOP - (an ancient
technique).
My list is from the top of my head but if Dolphin does not know
something about all of these things, I should be very much surprised.
Consult Johnny and you may well, if he deems it appropriate, receive
an instant and totally unexpected take on the entire situation and
implications. Like Brion, he is preternaturally knowledgeable. An
international savant adept in orthogenetic techniques of energy-redeployment
designed to combat lemming fever, he recognized that one alters
one's culture by altering oneself, coercing the human form beyond
the limits with which it has become familiar. Making the perceptual
shift possible. (Making dreams happen, as Brion expressed it.)
Fortunately Dolphin has written and published extensively, and all
this is evident in his literary work, not in an upfront, obtrusive
manner, but with the saturation and sensuous abandon quite obviously
produced by someone in love with significance in experience, someone
who has been there and brought back evidence."
Terry Wilson 2001
Send John Dolphin Allen an email
SYNERGETIC PRESS
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