William Burroughs' notion of shamanism had to do with contacting the most idiosyncratic part of one's nature and using those as a 'shaman's stick.' He eschewed formalised magic and religion of every kind. He 'looked for allies' in the perceived world as a Polynesian sailor would look for navigational signs of water breeze and scent. His was a rigorous discipline: to return to the touchstone of so-called subjectivity, to the perceived world as it is actually perceived, not as we are told it is - the way of the artist.

After working for thirty years in dance, theatre and performance art, I wanted to search for a new form of ensemble work that would integrate development of on-going historic enterprises with deep impulses of the sacred.

During the rehearsals for Chronorama, each actor identifies a 'vivid moment,' from his/her waking or dreaming life. The trick is not to interpret this moment but to focus attention on the powerful and very subjective sensual impressions coursing through it. Each of these moments takes on a life of its own in the context of the ensemble's collective present moment. This becomes a vivid navigational fix relative to a path of attention through other present moments: past, present and future. The implications of the lines of history that we uncover resonate in areas both personal and societal.

Burroughs spoke of the 'monumental fraud of cause and effect.' In the West, the Surrealists and many others have for decades investigated and perceived of continuity of time/plot/history through works of art. Alfred Jarry's 'pataphysics' or, more recently, in mathematical terms, singularities, have been of particular importance.

When I recently encountered the work of Julian Barbour, the theoretical physicist and author of The End of Time, I realised that his point of view in science parallels our approach to 'Chronorama.' Our 'vivid moment' seemed interchangeable with his 'time capsule' and vice versa. Julian intuits that we are equipped, as infants, with faculties that have yet to be explored in physics. His expanding cosmos of all possibilities is made up of Nows and time is the creation of possibilities: our Theatre of All Possibilities is composed of micro and macro performances. These faculties give us a way to comprehend the cosmos/universe in a novel way that perhaps is hinted at in the General Theory of Relativity.

The end is the beginning, and the beginning is the end.

Kathelin Gray

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