The first material I posted yesterday detailed the creative development process from late December 2024 through to the second week of January. Today, I outline thoughts, decisions and developments that have taken place over the past ten days.
I have been considering Mr. Stevens as the Minotaur and whether this is a motif or subtle storyline in the installation. I think that anyone who encounters a bull changeling, depending upon their cultural positionality and educational background, may form a link and find/make a connection to the story of the Minotaur in Greek Mythology. I cannot shy away from this, so how to embrace it?
The World History Encyclopedia, in Greek Mythology, as outlined by Saint (2022) Ariadne was the Minotaur’s half-sister. She came up with the clever idea of using a red thread for Theseus to use as a method to escape the labyrinth where the Minotaur was held. Ariadne gave Theseus (with whom she was infatuated) a sword to kill the Minotaur in addition the red thread. Theseus nominated himself as a tribute as the Minotaur was annually fed fourteen young tributes - devouring them alive. Ariadne’s desire for Theseus and possible revulsion at her half-brother’s dietary requirements outweighed any familial loyalty. What would the Minotaur feel at such disloyalty? The monster Minotaur of the myth is aggressive, violent, and hyper-masculine. Any Google image search will show the typical Minotaur imagery in one form or another. I have included four (below) from a quick search in Pixabay.
Minotaur images downloaded from Pixabay 22/01/2025
In this classic story, the Minotaur may not have the human capacity for feeling. But supposing he did? In this case, what if beyond the tropes of a base human buried masculine capacity for feeling or sensitivity, the Minotaur in Honouring Mr. Stevens has a heightened sensitivity, sensibilities and capacity for empathy? What if this iteration of the Minotaur - Mr Stevens, as the changeling, is in a liminal place because he has unresolved business from his life as a human - former life?
Participants who encounter Mr Stevens, the changeling, in a three-piece, 1940s suit, are not going to encounter the monster Minotaur of Greek Mythology. Rather, this is a creature in need who has been wounded beyond mortally.
In 2015, through Barking Spider Creative (formerly Barking Spider Visual Theatre) with Jason Lehane and other artists, we created a double-bill theatre work, Psychopomp and Seething. It is to “Psychopomp” I now refer. A psychopomp is a being that transports the soul from the recently deceased to the afterlife. For this show, as writer, I selected four animal psychopomps, horse, moth, owl and dog, but in researching for Honouring Mr. Stevens, I have discovered that more than animals can manifest as psychopomps and that the typical types of animals defined as a psychopomp with any internet search is limited. In Chapter 5 ‘Flesh and Bone The Semiotics of Mortality’ of ‘Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages’, Caciola (2016) outlines the myriad of forms a psychopomp can take, even the transformation of a psychopomp from animal, to vegetable, to object and all manner of semi-creature, semi-object, semi-human. There is no reason that this changeling is not a psychopomp; it is Mr. Stevens with unresolved “business” that keeps him here in this weird mortal form.
JANUARY 22 References
Barking Spider Visual Theatre (2015) Psychopomp, Barking Spider Visual Theatre website, accessed 22 January 2025. https://barkingspidercreative.com.au/psychopomp-seething/
Caciola N (2016) Afterlives:The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Accessed January 22, 2025. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Lehane J (2024) Jason Lehane website, accessed 22 January 2025. https://www.jasonlehane.com.au/
Saint J (2022) World History Encyclopedia, accessed 22 January 2025. https://www.worldhistory.org/Ariadne/