Fire Season took my breath away
“When I am a desert, will it matter who loved me? Will my bones, bleached by the radiation of this white-hot fire remember the currents that contracted, extended, relaxed, as fingers touched by skin?”
So says the voice in my ears, as I joined a few hand fulls of fellow travelers as we walked across the fire-scarred Santa Monica Mountains, participating in, experiencing, and immersing ourselves in the hour-long meditative, locative performance called Fire Season, written and performed by Monica Miklas and Capital W.
Her voice in our ears came on headphones attached to little radios.
And the experience is quite intimate. There’s an ASMR dimension, not gonna lie. But really it feels like a combination of guided meditation, guided walk, and walk with a very close friend — or maybe a walk inside the head of a very close friend.
All told, there were probably 8 of us, but we weren’t walking together. In fact, something about the experience made it feel like that would be a violation, like disrupting someone’s silent retreat. I kept my distance, gave people their space to experience it on their own. Others, walked in pairs.
For the most part, we were free to explore the hillsides within the range of the radio signal with encouragement to find our ways back if we started to lose the signal. I would sometimes grab my radio to extend the signal, using my body as an antenna. It gave us freedom and yet boundaries, as though we were all tethered together by invisible ties.
Much of the meditation was about the landscape, the environment, as she served up history and cultural references both personal and more geological, intertwining the two when she told us about the fires that crossed the land of her parent’s house. That seems to be the impetus of this show, which will now transform as it moves to Colorado as part of the Denver Film Festival’s immersive offerings. At other times, she shared intimate moments, words for her lover:
“I know that kissing you won’t keep the temperature from going up one degree instead of two…”
And in this moment of erotic nature writing, we were brought into an even more intimate connection with our performer. And yet, somehow, we were still at a distance, reading someone else’s love letters, overhearing someone else’s intimate whisper.
(mild spoilers ahead)
The most intimate moment, or most connected, may have been when we were called back at the end around a little camp circle near the tent from which she broadcasts this performance live. At a picnic table, Monica continued to speak to us through the microphone, for that was the line of our connection to her.
I asked her after the performance, why not record it? Why not let people experience it on her phones. But for Monica this was a performance, existing in a moment, not something to be recorded, maybe “canned.”
I was thinking of a piece I very much love, Dark by Then, a “locative agnostic” piece, a phrase I am borrowing from Noah J Nelson, founder of No Proscenium who coordinates it with Kathryn Yu, who was also in attendance. In It Must Have Been Dark By Then, the participant is guided to walk through whatever space they are in and then to meditate and stop and read a complementary text. The experience is very much different because the app does not know where in the world you are or at least does not reference that. Instead that piece is about any place being tied to every place, as the text travels through 3 locations around the globe.
The most reminiscent moment was when Monica told us to stop and look around us. And here I paraphrase:
Stop where you are. Look around you. This place has never before existed because it has never been through this moment. Take a breath. Be in this space that has never been and will never be again.
But Monica’s piece is not about anywhere. It is about a somewhere and someones, that are linked through the fiery geography of bodies and land. She recites:
“Always these thoughts of fire. Take me to the desert. I want to see your skin turn gold, to make you wear a hat to shade your face.”
At the end, we were given a beautiful fold-out zine, which we found under a rock at our place around the circle. We were encouraged to write post cards to our representatives, encouraging them, exhorting them to fight climate change.
I wrote mine to Jeremy Hight because I just couldn’t stop thinking of 34 North, 118 West, that groundbreaking locative piece set near the campus of Sci-Arc, that piece that taught how location and the digital and art. His work on that would inspire our collaboration, The LA Flood Project, a piece that is the mirrored inverse of Fire Season, imagining the effects of an epic, even biblical flood hitting Los Angeles.
For LA is a space of the imaginary.
That Church over there. No one worships there. That’s the Church from West World. The rest of the town burned in the fire, oh, except the train station from Dr. Quinn Medicine woman. So, yes, we were walking through the remains of the charred landscape of dreams. And yet there were signs of rebuilding, regrowth, renewal. Oh, LA, so many times knocked into the gutter, so many times you stand back up again.
And so, this burned down movie lot is such an apt place for this intimate encounter with the land of dreams, built up on such precarity, at this hour of rising heat, as we share a white-hot connection with the voice of such a talented performer. I should say a talented team. Along with the director and producer Lauren Ludwig, composer Susan Voelz and cellist Susanna Cervantes, I found Christina Bryan, the fabulous production manager, with whom I share my own connection, as she was my student, a few moons ago, at a university just a little south of where were standing. She has long dreamed of starting fires with novel, experimental, and fringe theatrical experiences. And with Capital W, I believe she has found a home. I had heard about the group from Celia Pearce’s Indiecade event: Playable Theatre Live Action Games Online Symposium, which fanned some flames of mine..
