Tagging along with my sometimes lover and passionate best friend, who always leads me into fascinating experiences and surprising depths of emotions, I once again found myself facing the heavy gray door of the Drilling Company in the early hours of the morning, scraping up tape and painting over a myriad of scuff marks, baptizing the tiny theatre's stage new with a coat of black semi-gloss latex paint. My partner in crime was designing the lighting for the theatre's newest experimental production, to which she only vaguely described to me as being "organic", indefinable, possessing no book... and I painted barefoot in the night, with lights of different position and hue coming up and down, fading in and out in bursts of varied speed and color as she flicked through cues in her head. I wore patches of black paint as we stumbled home in the early dawn. It had been a year since I had painted a stage, since I had been up all night painting a space that would be brought to life by bodies moving across it. A year since I had to fiercely scrub huge parts of my body to barely remove those patches of paint, and I covered them as much as I could with sassy heels for my afternoon interview. Only later did I discover the parts I had missed on the backside of my right arm. I am what I am, sir.
That evening I was a part of the crew, one of the gang, I overheard bits and pieces of a runthrough, I was ready. It was a cool subject, cool group of people...
I had no idea what was coming.
A sassy waitress slung around drinks and coin change, the M.C. for the evening took names for the poetry slam that was supposed to take place. As the audience stumbled in a group at a time, a few people did come forward and speak with the M.C. before finding their places in the audience. With ease and familiarity, with subtlety and nervous energy, the intimate space quickly evolved into an interactive, all encompassing evolution, a tempestuous and vaguely uncomfortable transformation from the stereotypes we all hear, we all know to something we cannot escape. At first these social grenades are achingly brought up from the interaction of the multicultural cast, in artfully earnest and organic personal discussion with each other, that quickly escalates into pointed, witty commentary on the origins and perceptions of those stereotypical thoughts we all pretend to disassociate with. We as the audience are suspended in the perceptive dialogue, each of us responding to a different wealth of assumptions from the outside world, agreeing and disagreeing in our heads, wholly sucked into the Cypher...
what is the Cypher?
according to dictionary.com, the word cypher:
ci·pher also cy·pher (sī'fər)
n. The mathematical symbol (0) denoting absence of quantity; zero.
One having no influence or value; a nonentity.
A design combining or interweaving letters or initials; a monogram.
and thesaurus.com states:
Cypher Synonyms: device, emblem, figure, hieroglyph, letter, logo, mark, monogram, number, numeral, rune, sign, type, answer, clarify, decipher, dissolve, elucidate, figure out, illuminate, illustrate, make plausible, make reasonable, puzzle out, resolve, solve, straighten out, tidy, unfold, unravel
Notes: character is what one is; reputation is what one is thought to be by others
One of the actors described it as being in a circle with no end, a literal translation of the numerical character we know as zero. It is also specifically associated with a code, and the cracking of it, or, as the last line of the definition vaguely describes as "a design combining or interweaving", letters or people, the act of multiple "characters" folding in over each other multiple times is a deft allusion to our lives and perceptions and experiences overlapping with other people's, that we are inextricably linked to the perceptions and experiences and evolution and epiphanies of the others caught in the cypher with us. So as the actors spit rhymes and make poetic and striking allusions to different forms of racism based on stereotype, the flow is periodically interrupted with a clinical/encyclopedic discussion of what skin really is: the history of evolution evidenced for us on our bodies. At the same time, we are reminded that biologically, once past the initial melanin content that floats on the surface, we are constructed alike, with membranes and tissues, muscles and nerves, emotional reactions, blood, sweat and tears.
The piece closes with the characters being reborn, baptized new with tap water and awareness, as they first investigate what they see on their own skin with fresh eyes: color, metaphor, experience, emotion. Reaching forward into the audience to describe what they see when they look at the individuals in the audience before them, the room resonates with words like "honey", "mahogany", "earth", "open", "cinnamon", "cream", "golden". Suddenly, these actors are speaking the language of my artist soul and heart and hands. No person's skin color can be found in a paint tube, all luminous and convincing skin is painted with equal parts light and shadow, warmth and coolness, subtle combinations of dioxazine purple and lavender reflections, of sienna and ocher and cadmium red, oxides and cerulean and titanium white, just as we are all colorful reflections of our environment and history. The actors find in us, the audience, the broad palette of colors and emotions that an artist begins with, all of the colors that will build a final product, a creative incarnation, a child born of inspiration and passion.
Just as this piece was born from the intellectual coupling of brilliant, inspired and passionate people.
Welcome to the Cypher.
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