Events

Orf's Immolation is a performance event to be staged on the evening of Mardi Gras in New Orleans. The work engages the notion of sacrifice, which has been used in times of political turmoil, as an extreme gesture of anger and protest. This work is concerned with what is sacred and what is at risk, what is fragile in the unique culture of New Orleans. It also confronts the current social and political forces that have brought about conditions in America that led to the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath.

Orf is a character derived from the legend of Orpheus, developed for the ongoing work, A Season In Hell, a project of the US Department of Art & Technology. Orf comes to New Orleans to bear witness to the tragedy of death and the loss that threatens the spirit of the City. He has come to stage an act of immolation in the streets of New Orleans on the evening of Mardi Gras as a gesture of purification, defiance, catharsis and rebirth. Prior to the immolation, he will walk through the streets of the City over a 13-hour period, singing traditional music of blues and jazz, collecting artifacts that represent the essence of New Orleans: artifacts that embody its eclectic mixture of cultures, paganism, and music.

Orf will dress all in white, wearing a white tragic mask (in keeping with Mardi Gras) with a necklace of pagan artifacts. He will walk slowly and deliberately through the streets of New Orleans, the hurricane-torn neighborhoods, from the St. Bernard Parish through the Lower 9th Ward, to the Bywater into the French Quarter, observing and absorbing the destruction. During the evening of Mardi Gras, imagery from news footage of the Hurricane will be projected on him that ends in a finale of virtual fire and immolation.

At approximately 11pm, Orf enters the circle, he stops, he sets the artifacts all around him, forming a circle within the circle. He kneels. As he extends his arms high in the air, reaching to the dark sky, singing, two video projectors will shower him with media imagery drawn from the hurricane: flames, flying debris, flooding, stranded victims, debris and destruction aimed like fire hoses, as smoke rises in the air from the circle of flares. The imagery "burns" bright on his white clothes and mask as he holds himself extended, before falling to the ground.