Dragon's Breath Theater
Lakshminkara and The Tiger
PERFORMED BY CHUCK HENDERSON

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An evening of experimentation into new ways of using The Kaleidica. For this performance I combined story telling, live Tibetan and Tuvan chant and a recorded Kaleidica Light Performance.

This piece revolved around the a story of Lakshminkara, an ancient Yogic Princess who becomes a mahasiddhi (almost saint-like in the Yogic pantheon) and her encounter with a Royal Bengal Tiger during her three year isolation and meditation in the caves of Southern India.

The telling of the story (which I will not recount here) was followed by a five minute recorded Kaleidica Light Instrument piece using a series of images - mostly of human and animal eyes - that recount in abstract form her interaction with the tiger.

As they stare each other down, eye to eye, I developed the Kaleidica piece to reflect this face-to-face meeting.

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By using my image brushes at a low blend value I was able to effectively dissolve from one image to another. This created very smooth transitions.

Also, for this piece I used only the Mirror Studio with the symmetry set to two way mirror. So the left half of the screen was always mirroring the right half. This constantly reinforced the idea of a bilateral face which, when combined with the reinforcing eye imagery, constantly brought the performance into the standoff between Lakshminkara and the tiger.

By adjusting the skew value (using the "t" and "y" keys I was able to make the eyes warp and adjust almost like the muscles of the face were making different subtle expressions.

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Eyes are fascinating shapes to work with. Closed they portray complete inward meditation. Open they convey a sense of intense interactions with whatever they might be looking at. Because the story involved the relationship between an animal and human in close physical proximity the idea of dissolving between the eyes of the human and the animal was effective in creating a dissolution of separateness. The two became one.
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Remember that these single images are taken directly from the performance piece which was projected at full xga or 1024 by 768 pixels. As a performance it completely outshone any video (even a high-def video) because of its excellent resolution and color rendition. The eyes were especially vibrant as you can see in the images to the left.
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In the final sequence, the two eyes converge and form a single solitary eye symbolizing, I suppose, the convergence of opposites, the tiger and Lakshminkara in a wave of essential emptiness.