Saint Genet's Declarations of Aesthetic

Transports of Delirium: Aesthetic Acesis in 4 Acts

This was our battle cry, our banner, our shield.

Act I: First Conversion

Saint Genet began the ritual within the shell of what was once Lawrimore Project,  creating ephemeral images, inciting impossible poetic actions from exhausted and drug induced performers, slowly creating and re-creating a sacred space, revealing beautiful and disturbing images of sexual power and abjection stretched to the breaking point of sustainability.

This was the act of deflowering, presented symbolically through the performer’s own initiative.

Act II: Defiance of All

Defiance of All meticulously utilized the body as an instrument to reveal pivotal images.  In a field of over 12,000 hand placed stalks of grass gently placed in the now identified sacred performance space, each stalk became a sacrificial lamb to the heightened forms of "The Ballet.”  This brutal and terrifying form created a collective unconsciousness leading to the final image of Olivier Wevers quietly and gently shooting a loaded gun over the ballerina Chalness Eames and into the back of a patiently waiting Derrick Ryan Claude Mitchell.

This act of willing was the first Poetic Attitude governed by pride.

Act III Triumph and Ruin

After a beautiful, ritual preparation with honey, wine and flour, a whirling, nauseating and terrifying rendition of Black Baby, one of Jim Jones’ and The People's Temple’s most beautiful and hypnotic hymns, was sung by Kate Ryan. Lit by 66 candles and supported by 10 cassette players running independent audio tracks, this piece led the company into a collective abyss.

This was a manifestation of the recognition of evil, and created the psychological condition of the original crisis.

Act IV: Sacred History

As their final Declaration of Aesthetic, Saint Genet expanded the final moments of The People's Temple in Jonestown, Guyana. A chilling, glacial narrative was presented through a 70 lb. pile of flowers, a hidden and beautiful voice, a circle of blood, a circle of honey, mounds of gold-leafed performers, the dead and buried, the resurrected, and piles and piles of falling ash.

This symbolic Poetic Gesture was the final act of willing, forcing the ascendancy of the Saint.

That is how Saint Genet left the former Lawrimore Project. A tomb. Cured now of an unfinished passion that had long caused suffering.

This is how Saint Genet enters the Lawrimore Project thinking the unthinkable, maintaining the unmaintainable, never stopping, never ever stopping, for if we stop, even for a moment, we may remember that we have struck and are bleeding bleeding. We may remember that we have been broken by our sacred history.

Saint Genet has created an environment evoking the ever present past of the performances.   A mural, two-dimensional objects by NKO and kinetic sculpture by Casey Curran all work to recall a visceral past and the sinister context for the following offering:

Five hundred hand-placed stalks of grass surround a vitrine housing Whip It Canister, 2011, Edition 1/666, an empty steel shell coated in ash and resting on a bed of flour.  This is the object of their failure,  used to destroy the will of the artists in the performances, now a potential key to their ascendancy past death, past success, past true and past false.

Converted, illuminated, confirmed. Me, you, all of us our hearts pounding...It is impossible to turn back.

...nothing is beautiful save that which is not.