Odysseus Finn: Into the divine maelstrom
One of humanity’s greatest disconnects is from the universe.
This is a massive insanity, a monstrous mental and physical trauma.
Odysseus Finn is trying to heal this with sound art.
The setting, the launch pad for this aural lift-off, is utterly epic; the domed City Hall auditorium with its grand architecture is prettily dotted with subversive pink orbs, a precient sign. We are about to be launched by the seat of our broeks into space, time and divine disorder.
The simple video screen backdrop, a white flag with a black hole is raised.
Our trip into the unknown is starting. A trio of musical sailors busy themselves on decks with tings and tines, and knotty notes. They are rolling drumbeats, creating loops of base and lead guitars and electronic piano.
And other stuff is coming from shiny little tech boxes crawling around their feet like big black-and-silver beetles with lots of orbs and antennae waving around.
The sails are billowing, and its all hands on board for writer director Michael McQuilken, and his crew of co-writer David van Witt and Pierre Bourgeoise.
We journey. It is not an easy ride. The universe is a dangerous maelstrom. There are freak storms which bash against our rib cage. The universe has found a leak in our stuffed up social psyche; it has punched a little fountain through the barriers of ideology and propaganda which have made us such dutiful little ja-corporal cookie-cutting Boxer-like workhorse happy idiots.
Captain McQuilken and his crew have called us out of the filthy bilges of global capitalist sub-consciousness and are showing us a new way.
We find ourselves adrift, from that receding land of Outsurance and excess, KFC, SARS, Cape Town traffic, in-your-face beggars, home-care givers in Langa tending to the terminally ill for a never ending EPW-paid pittance administered by a DA provincial health department … we are free of the divisive Blade and Don’t-call-me-I’ll-call-you Zuma and his BLF fans.
We look back on our bleak, bleak, bleak life in the toxic termite colony.
Out here we touch stars, we reverie and jump around and bop and groove.
And then we reverse-play back into the world of our body, where we marvel at the vast mystery of galaxies in just one little cell of you. Now we trail our digits over smooth lakes and soak up the last rays of the sun-dappled forests.
Yes, it does all of this, if you let go and allow the captain and his crew take your consciousness and scatter it like seed to the astral wind.
That is until the stage manager comes in and tells skipper McQuilken time’s up dude, cut to fade. Literally, WTF man!
This is the sound, art, theatre, media, of all this past and present folded infinitesimally into one big bang.
And it is loud. It has to be, because the termite hill is imploding and we are not awake!
You can still catch Odysseus Finn at the Cape Town Fringe on Friday 30 September and Sunday 2 October. Bookings and details here.