Setting: Post nihilistic world of dirt and refuse. Dancers are strewn onstage moving in some shared, but unknown language of gestures. A singular lady in red sits separate from the group. Is she observing or participating in the fate of these wretched beings? Death or Divinity?

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The year is not too distant in the future
In a time when all but one remembers a previous world fraught with wars
devastated by insatiable desires. 
A world who’s history is myth when it’s inhabitants are void of language,
a language lost from fear of technological surveillance and the genocides it birthed. 

A lone soul of this post-humanist world witnessed the twilight of Earth’s nurturing climate

before it became the glutton’s left over. 
Mute from the violence of Gaia’s response, 
he shares the tale to a few.

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(B)Loom is a response to Christina Chan's Loom from Crossings 2019. It premiered last November in the Studio Theatre as part of the NAFA Dance Alumni's homecoming programme. It does not present as the official or sanctioned sequela of Loom. As a full length dance theatre piece, (B)Loom explores the dualities of man's morality: birth vs death; myth vs reality; destiny vs self-determination.  It tells the tale of a commune of  unspeaking human survivors, save for a few words, in search of the water tree, a plant or organism  allegedly able to quench thirst and hunger, and cure illnesses of anyone who grows it.  Led by one of the last witnesses (if not the last one) of a greener world, the collective goes on a quest for this famed tree. In their search, lives are lost, bartered for some evidence of the tree's existence.  Each member desperate to show proof of the tree in the hope of becoming the next leader of the pact.

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DRAMATURGICAL NOTES

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Prologue The Conflict

 

Scene 1 The commune

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The leader narrates his last sojourn to the mountains before war overtook mankind.  He reveals a transcendental vision of a higher being telling him about a mystical all-cure tree. The commune celebrates this information in dance, while abuse happens to one of the youngest members of the group.

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Scene 2 The Quest

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The members separate in groups to look for the water tree or for some evidence of its existence.  Death, betrayal and mishap meet the search parties along the way.

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Scene 3 The return

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After months on their voyage, the groups return, with several members dead, and with an expectant girl who fears to reveal the father of her  unborn child.  To save her from derision and punishment of the collective (for conceiving without paternal and ritual approval), the leader takes her hand in union.  He then forsakes his betrothed for the would-be-mother. The first spouse bemoans the incident to no avail. 

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Scene 4 The Birth/Death

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As festivities continue in anticipation of the new born, the young mother dies in childbirth, unexpectedly, after the second delivery.

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Scene 5 The Leader: Blood of the Loom

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In guilt and remorse, the leader  violently laments the mother's death and discovers a strange, twisted and scintillating organism in the commune's abode.  Could it be the mythical tree? He tastes a leaf.  It is poisoned. The commune become nomads, without a figure head to keep them together.

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Epilogue Revelation

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The narrator reveals who he is and what has happened after the leader's death, while creating more questions about the story's trajectory.

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Music

Eyes Shut-Nocturne in C Minor by Arnalds & Ott

Xenoanthropology by Johannson

L’annonce by Quentin Sirjacq

Père et fils by Quentin Sirjacq

Quartet in B flat, Op. 18- No. 5 by Beethoven 

Kawaidski by Quentin Sirjacq

Main Titles by Jason Hill

Memory Palace II: Power Lines by Christopher Cerrone

And She Was by Carlos Cipa

Mack The Knife by Robbie Williams

Says by Nils Frahm

Old Tree by Hexvessel

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Prose and Poetry from 

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Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

Prodical Son by Leah Goldberg

Genesis 4:1-16

Hamlet by Shakespeare

West World by Michael Crichton

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Script and Direction by DrFil

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