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Epyllion is an incorporation of puppetry, ritual, gesture, and song to create a world that taps into the innate intelligence of the body. An epyllion is a short epic poem of erotic and mythological content, a story of old that bring us to a better understanding of Eros. Traditionally, audiences attend the performance of an epic not because they want to hear a new story, but to live a story they already know through its telling, to be a part of the experience. The nature of the ritual is to encourage the audience to bring their own life into play, making our stories their own. |
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IDOL: The World of Epyllion
Lindsay Abromaitis-Smith
Epyllion is an incorporation of puppetry, ritual, gesture, and song to create a world that taps into the innate intelligence of the body. An epyllion is a short epic poem of erotic and mythological content, a story of old that bring us to a better understanding of Eros. Traditionally, audiences attend the performance of an epic not because they want to hear a new story, but to live a story they already know through its telling, to be a part of the experience. The nature of the ritual is to encourage the audience to bring their own life into play, making our stories their own.
We are at a time of great forgetfulness of our roots. In search of meaning, I went back to the roots of theater—ritual storytelling. I search for the story of what feeds us. And in this search, I ask the people I am working with, the music makers, other storytellers, and the audience to come together in a ritual storytelling of a way we might find answers: “What are we made of? What nourishes us? Who are the people we share bread with? How do we find the sacred in the everyday?” As storytellers, we bring life to our story and to the objects that inhabit the world of Epyllion. Just below the surface of the water in which we bathe or make our tea lies the realm of the flood and, within that, the moon. The fire that goes into baking bread or smoking is born from trying to understand and grasp the sun. Landscapes are built from the bones of creation, the ribcage of our collective breathing from whose center we draw the four elements that weave us together and define the layers of existence and pathways through which we travel.
Lindsay Abromaitis-Smith, Toad, 2011. Southeast Asian seed pod, thread, rubber bands, tubing, metal, and wood. Photo credit: Benjamin Heller. Courtesy of the artist.
If human performers are vessels that can carry stories through their bodies to the audience, then a puppet is the ultimate storyteller, a tool that channels what needs to be expressed. We create icons and images of the sacred as a tool, as medicine, a means to be in contact with and remember greater powers. It is a way to connect with our highest selves, a chance to play gods as well as to interact with them on a more intimate and simpler scale. What intrigues me with puppetry is the extent to which we, the puppeteers, give energy and life to these puppets through a worshipful surrender to the will of the puppet. We move with them, send our physical impulses out into their limbs; we breathe with them.
In the creation of the world of Epyllion, I encourage the building of a safe place where the body as a vessel can pour out its contents. To give the chance to listen, see, and feel what may put us at ease and at home in ourselves. To discover what nourishes the infinite possibilities of our hearts’ desires. To give the chance to let go of the building pressures and oppressive forces that keep us from finding our balance within ourselves, with each other, with this earth our mother, with the elements, with source energy. Our daily bread, the salt of the earth, flowing waters outside and within, breath, and song. I want to unravel personal mythology, what is embedded in the psyche, the spine, the skin, in our breath, to see what we can weave together. To peel back the layers in order to expose and to be reborn, to grow out of our societal containment.
