Description
The ECDYSIS project is a series of costume, music and dance performances taking thier inspiration from reptiles – their natural beauty and their fundamental place in the world.
Our latest exploration is THE SCALES OF THE WORLD, a compelling and emotive story, an invitation to let the scales fall from your eyes, an altered reality of unique costume, visceral dance, visual poetry, and powerful music. We offer you an energetic invitation to dance and a moment to consider your place in the world through a process of revelation, rebelion and reinvention.
The story is an allegory following the life of a tree and a man as they are both cut down.
The story is presented in several short sections, each of which takes both branch and man on a transformative journey from riverbank through to a flooded world. Each section is represented through a mythical, reptilian being and invites the audience to travel on a journey of reinvention and transcendence.
Prelude – Cracking. A thunderstorm moves down from the mountains and lightening strikes an ancient willow tree. The
fallen willow is carried by the river before rooting into the ground and growing upwards again.
Chapter 1 – The Willow Snake. A man is cutting willow by the river to make a basket as a present for an absent lover. As
he works a Willow Snake encircles his wrist before he is struck dead by lightening. He falls to the ground amongst cut
willow branches. The willow roots again into the earth and grows up through the body of the man.
Chapter 2 – The Glass Snake. The man enters a spirit realm, a world of confusions. He is confronted by a Glass Snake
which challenges his concepts of reality. The man perceives a hot-air ballon passing overhead with a basket hanging
beneath it, and beneath that a rope. He reaches for the rope but the rope shatters into a million glass shards and he is
lost within the refracted light, falling into a glass vase.
Chapter 3 – Moura, The Eyed Lizard. The man finds himself at the entrance to an underground tomb or gateway. The
path is guarded by a Moura. The Moura invites him to enter this other world and to accept his fate.
Chapter 4 – The Great Serpent (Maxa’ xkuk). The man passes into the earth and meets the Great Serpent, Maxa’ xkuk.
The serpent is liquid and solid simultaneously. Its presence signals a great flood that will engulf all the land, swallowing
the man along with it. Two branches from the ancient willow tree are carried by the tides to the opposite poles of the
world and begin to grow. Each tree produces a single fruit and each fruit contains a single life, and a new begining.
