We mean to change the world, of course. We mean to change the course of the world. We intend to reattach the outer world to the inner one, the surface world to the world of deepness, our present experience to the deepest memories and to the farthest flung futures. We mean to embody the noblest ______ of everyone who came before, and in the name of everyone who comes after. To begin enacting a more meaningful way of being alive. We mean to wake to our finest destiny. To remember, and to help others remember, all of the connections that allow us to be here. To remember that there is no separation of mind and body, of self and surroundings.
We intend to change the story, to rewrite the old stories, to rewrite the laws. We mean to quell our anger with a sound application of justice. We mean to re-include the stuff that was edited out, the stuff that provides balance. We mean to reconnect with our deeper roles in the community. We mean to reestablish the community. We resolve to encounter, and to embrace, the Other.
We use the wisdom of our hearts and the vision of our deepest bone-knowing to navigate the way forward. And we trust that all will become clear. In a nick of time.
Invisible Horizon: A Religious Pamphlet
Sibyl Kempson
December 2020
Kempson’s theatrical writing, her plays, if you want to call them that, are anarchic scripted actions, destabilizing the framework of even experimental theater.
Ralph Lemon, Art in America
12 Shouts to the Ten Forgotten Heavens was a three-year performance immersion project by playwright, director, and performer Sibyl Kempson and her company, 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf. Co. Presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 12 Shouts began on the Vernal Equinox, March 2016, and unfolded on each solstice and equinox, with many beginnings and only one end, on the Winter Solstice, December 2018. It was offered as a celebration of the place-based sensitivity of the museum architecture and its awareness, interaction, and openness to the cycles and rhythms of the day, seasons, geographical location, and of human presence and interaction.
The 12 Shouts project as a whole represents a submission to a ritual cycle—an alignment with the breathing process of the Earth, as Rudolph Steiner would have it. This pamphlet is an experiential record of the flotsam and jetsam that washed up on the shore from the making of that project.
This pamphlet is part of UDP’s 2020 Pamphlet Series: twenty commissioned essays on collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing. The pamphlets are available for individual purchase and as a subscription. Each offers a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present, an engagement at once sustained and ephemeral. To view a full list of pamphlets, click here.
About the Author
Sibyl Kempson began making her own performances at Little Theater and Dixon Place at the turn of the millennium. Her plays have been presented in the United States, Germany, Norway, and now Austria. In 2015, she launched the 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf. Co. at the Martin E. Segal Center in NYC. 12 Shouts to the Ten Forgotten Heavens, a 3-year cycle of rituals for the Whitney Museum of American Art, recurred on every Solstice and Equinox from March 2016 to December 2018, with the curatorial guidance and support of Greta Hartenstein, and of 80+ performers and collaborators. Kempson is the recipient of a 2018 PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for American Playwright at Mid-Career, a 2017 graduate of New Dramatists, a 2014 USA Artists Rockefeller Fellow and a 2010 MacDowell Colony Fellow. She received her MFA in Playwriting at Brooklyn College, under the instigation of Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney. She also has a BA in Theater from Bennington College. Her plays are published by 53rd State Press, in PLAY: Journal of Plays, and Performance & Art Journal (PAJ). She teaches experimental performance writing at Sarah Lawrence College, at the Victoria College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, and through her company.
Praise
Praise for Previous Work
I think of Sibyl’s work as a form of life, not a kind of theatre. There’s a fundamental identification with vegetable matter in Sibyl’s work, with how things grow, the creepy superabundance and hypertrophies of both the natural and the psychic.
Karinne Keithley Syers, American Theatre
With an army of actors, musicians, designers, multimedia artists, and all kinds of crafters (practicing everything from kintsugi to knitting), she conceived what must be the most bizarre, baffling, welcoming, generous, mystical, creative, feminist and environmentally conscious site-specific performance work I have experienced, or maybe anyone has.
Molly Grogan, Artism
What’s serious and what’s silly are exactly the same thing for Kempson … But her intentions burrow down to the root of humanity … Kempson is one of the few experimental playwrights who uses non-linear structures and absurdist nutter-buttery to do concrete tasks. First, she wants us to better understand our mental processes, Second, she wants to use that knowledge to break down the less useful human habits we’ve built up over the last many thousand years. Third, she demonstrates through contagious example the kind of wild maenad productivity that comes from abandoning so-called 'dignity.'
Helen Shaw, Artforum
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Links
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-946433-57-2
Pamphlet
Staple-bound. 56 pp, 5 x 8 in
Publication Date: December 15 2020
Distribution: Asterism Books (US), Inpress Books (UK)
Series: 2020 Pamphlet Series