MIRA, CYCLE 1
The prospect of describing Mira, Cycle 1 fills me with the same despair I feel looking at my basement, which is cluttered with mostly useless objects that need to be sorted and put away or–more likely–thrown out. What a mess.
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Mira equates the self with the world–an important aspect of its gigantism, but not exactly a new idea. Walt Whitman used it over a century ago in “Song of Myself,” and with his omnivorous imagination actually succeeded in gobbling up the world, catapulting the reader into a place without boundaries, somehow transcending self-absorption. In the process he argued a political idea: the validity of democracy. Contraband also has political aspirations–press materials say that Mira is about “seeing the war without as a reflection of the war within.” And there is a section in which one dancer is Iraq, another America. One of them says, “My navel is my base of operations”; the other, “My navel is where I feel hunger.” They also say things like “My heart is my mind,” and “Within the illness is cure.” None of it makes much sense–in the context of this section, the piece, or the outside world.
The text suffers from a form of giantism too. There are Mirabai’s five lovely poems, of course (fortunately these are printed in a program insert; otherwise they would have been intelligible only intermittently). There’s Mann’s “Linear History,” and other bits of her story appear elsewhere in the piece. And there are hundreds of cryptic sayings, some of which are intelligible if not comprehensible: “The future is uncertain–so give up,” and “I am composted in your desires,” among many others. Because of the quantity of words, because of the live music, because the performers are frequently winded, much of what they say is lost. And much of it is intentional gibberish. The resulting sensation of drowning in a sea of words is not pleasant.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Janet Van Ham.
