The Metamorphosis of Fear

Free Columbia announces a NEW PROJECT: incorporating painting, colored light, video, movement, sound, music and social collaboration

EVENTS:

• November 9, 2024, at 7 pm: History of the Project and Game Night

• 3 Biography Sessions on Sundays at 2 pm by Soren Dietzel
  Come to explore your own relationship to transforming fear through your biography. These three guided recalling exercises have an arc in relationship to the 15 phases given by Rudolf Steiner to Jan Stutten when he gave him the theme. You may come to one or all three sessions.
  – November 10: Fear and Courage
  – November 17: Failure as Gift
  – November 24: Transformation
  Soren Dietzel is a musician and social artist. Immediately when meeting this theme, he found a correlation to the therapeutic biography work he has been doing for the last four years and set to work developing this research. He is using typical biography forms with prompts, art and sharing time as well as the incorporation of saxophone music.

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In 1918, at the end of the first world war, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), the Austrian-born founder of anthroposophy, gave the musician, composer, and scenery designer Jan Stuten (1890-1948) a task: to create a new, alternative color–art combining sound, colored light, color-movement, and colored shadows in a way that would leave the viewer free to interpret what was seen. In 1919, Steiner gave Stuten the theme Metamorphoses of Fear for the first work of this new art form, a theme related to people’s experiences from the just-ended world war. At that time, many people in central Europe were full of fear, and Steiner hoped this artwork could help them to transform or overcome their fear. In response to Steiner’s idea, Stuten drew with chalk on packing-paper fifteen sketches, which would be something like a full-score (or “storyboards”) for a new colored light-play, Metamorphoses of Fear. That which he suggested through the sketches as stage-pictures was intended to move and change itself in relationship to music.

It seems the world is often in a state of fear, and so once again, it seems appropriate to work with this theme and multimedia approach. In 2022, Nathaniel Williams led an exploration of this colored light play in association with composer Don Jamison. In this project, Frank Agrama, Luther Gennert, Else, and Laura Summer learned to play the “light horses,” overhead projectors with abstract colored light movements created by wheels of color.

Now a group of artists has come together to take this work further as a collaboration between people and their various media. The group includes: Frank Agrama – colored light, Loki Anthony and Nathaniel Blachere – animation, Soren Dietzel – music, Zoi Doehrer – music and performance art, Kai Naor – music, Sampsa Pirtola – video, Matt Sawaya – spoken word/music, Laura Summer – painting, Katja Wishart – painting.

The month of November will see this culmination of 9 months of work. A schedule of events and performances will follow next week.