When you remove your shoes, pad into the performance space and take your seat, it’s already begun.
The show. The teaching. The ceremony.
The dance.
As ambient music hums and flows, a dancer slowly dances. her feet always within a small circle that is at the center of a larger circle that is filled with circular bowls of circular rocks . . . all of which is surrounded by two circles of audience members: one on low benches, and behind them a second on chairs.
The dancer’s movements are slow, angular and intricate. Long white hair overhangs and obscures the face. Audience conversation inevitably wanes – attention irresistibly attracted to the mesmerizing movements.
This is more than theatrical performance: this dance among the stones has been going on forever.
Then the dancer – Jani Lauzon, creator and sole human performer of Prophecy Fog – prays to the Four Directions, opens this sacred space, and welcomes us, stepping assuredly into her additional roles of storyteller, teacher, interlocutor and guide.
For the next 75 minutes in the Coal Mine Theatre, she will tell us stories, ask us questions, and share mysteries and truths. We will learn about the Elders and family members who have guided and shared her steps. She will challenge us as her mother challenged her with the idea that “We come from the stars, we are star people” – a physical truth, given the composition of the elements of our bodies, but in what other, deeper ways is this true, as well? She will recount her journey to the Mojave Desert to commune with Giant Rock, the largest freestanding boulder in North America – a seven-storey-tall sacred site for indigenous peoples that has been desecrated throughout the twentieth-century by casual colonialist dynamite, UFO mania and graffiti.
Her question – can such a site still be sacred?
By way of an answer, she bears witness, listens, and shares with us an intimate, meditative and movement-filled conversation. Through her observations, her memories, and her questions (a recurring one – why weren’t sacred teachings written down?), she weaves a lithic tapestry that is obdurate yet pliable.
Projections of the landscape, her family, and even 1950s newsreel film clips play on screens that surround the sacred space, providing context and resonance. And Lauzon shares that space with hundreds – no, thousands – of “stones who have demanded that they be present throughout the creation of my work.”
The rocks are hard, round, and substantial. They are of the earth.
And they are vessels of the sky, imbued by meaning from without.
All of them are Lauzon’s co-stars in Prophecy Fog (the Elvis Stone is just the most flamboyant). And they are also the setting: ready and willing to be shifted, redistributed and reconnected to form place and enable connection. And finally, if you listen carefully, the rocks are a sentient medium through which to find meaning and transmit insight.
If the “prophecy fog” of the show’s title refers to the profane that obscures the sacred –like the graffiti on Giant Rock, or our broader colonialist stain — by the time we reach the dramatic and perfect inversion of the show’s end, there is no fog at all.
Just a beautiful, personal, and breathtakingly deep sense of connection with our stories and our world.
This show – this lesson, this ceremony – is both timely and timeless.
It has a human beat and rhythm, an of-the-moment-ness in this time of battles over place and fumbling attempts at reconciliation. And it’s set within the vast inexorability of a much larger geological, spiritual and astral clockwork.
So even as you put your shoes back on and make your way out onto Woodbine Avenue, listen.
Close your eyes. Visualize.
The show? The teaching? The ceremony? That dance?
Your dance?
It never stopped.
Prophecy Fog is on stage until December 10, 2023. Visit coalminetheatre.com to reserve tickets.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesayarts Magazine, 2023
