ARA PROJECT 2014-2018
ARA is the goddess of tears. Her name has various meanings including “ocean” and“eye.” Her tears flow down and become rivers and oceans, they drift up and become stars shining in the Milky Way. Each tear memorializes a story, evoking sadness, love, desperation, and hope. I am inspired by the power of ancient myths. Why do we need myth? Myth connects us to our land and to each other. Myths connect us through time and space. From our homelands to new lands. From ancestor time to the present. Shining a light on how we may continue to the future. All over the world the connection of original peoples to their land is being lost and with that disappear myths and rituals. Through this process of modernization, we lose a body of wisdom accumulated over millennia that served as a blueprint of how to protect and sustain the environment. ARA is how people empower themselves through their stories. Stories as medicine. My vision is to turn people’s stories into highly collaborative community art rituals. To create new myth that connects us to our new lands and our new, urbanvillages/communities that we live in.
This performance ritual calls in the myths that connect us to our lands, to nature, our common history, and belief systems. We are guided by a vision to shed patriarchal colonial rule which this country was built on and still permeates the world with great oppression and coinciding grief. Through ritual-making, myth, history and our cultures connect us through space and time. From our ancestral homelands to here. From past to future. Myth shines a light on how we may continue into the future and heal fractured relationships from the echo of repeated history that we live now. What we can do, as human beings, in this world is to gather and share our stories, which have been passed down from our ancestors, and create/perform rituals to connect, inspire and heal.
MAGO is the creator goddess in ancient Korean mythology, central to the practice of mudang. The legend of Mago outlines this piece, which aims to express the interconnectedness of dreams and reality, past and present lives, karma and destiny, microcosm and macrocosm. Through an exploration of the myth of Mago and Dohee's own story, the piece unfolds in six chapters, revealing this interconnectedness and its implications in one’s life. The work itself is an intensely personal journey of birth, self-discovery, confrontation, action, and re-birth.
MAGO is the creator goddess in ancient Korean mythology, central to the practice of mudang. The legend of Mago outlines this piece, which aims to express the interconnectedness of dreams and reality, past and present lives, karma and destiny, microcosm and macrocosm. Through an exploration of the myth of Mago and Dohee's own story, the piece unfolds in six chapters, revealing this interconnectedness and its implications in one’s life. The work itself is an intensely personal journey of birth, self-discovery, confrontation, action, and re-birth.
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The Inspiration for ARA Ritual I, II: Waterways and Time Weaves is Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, a Korean immigrant woman who came as a child with her family to the U.S., settling in San Francisco in 1964, after the Korean War. She moved to New York to pursue her art in 1980 and by 1982, she was taken from us, raped and murdered, a week after the release of her autobiographical work, Dictee. She was 31 years old. The Cha family lived through the most intense historical time in Korea right after the war: dictatorship, student uprisings, rapid industrialization, and then moved to the U.S. in the midst of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Through her work, these histories weave into present time. The same struggles for civil rights, equality, justice, rights of expression, women’s rights, immigrant rights and refugee experience are still present and affect our lives. The inspiration of Cha continues on with our final ARA Ritual III: Waterways, Time Weaves through CoRazOn, The Bay Area Bhutanese Youth Group and Puri Arts Creative Ensemble. We have cultivated and integrated our stories as an offering for the ancestors who brought us here to exist and to remember their stories. Their stories through our voices are essential for creating and cultivating strength and hope.
ARA Ritual I-III has been guided by the spirits of Mago, Ara, Obangshinjang, Baridaegi, Ogoo, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and all collaborator’s ancestors. This performance ritual is dedicated to them, our ancestors, and all immigrant and refugee people who still endure so much hardship, to their lives, hopes and to justice. And to all people who died fighting for justice from the past into present time.
Dead words,
dead Tongue.
Buried in Time’s Memory.
Unemployed.
Unspoken.
History
Past.
From DICTEE
by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Not only is this project sharing the concept of human from the depth of ancient myth, but also it tells about the world through micro place (energy/spiritual infrastructure of the world) and macro-world (the perceivable world). I always believe in art which has great strength to access and convey the vital messages into the micro and macro ways of the world.
Community workshops are the key to this project.
ARA workshops combine music and movement exploration with drawing and writing. Workshop inquiry will explore how home connects to the body (physical, emotional, imaginary) and the world (land, ocean, universe). We will explore how this creates belief systems. To reveal these connections, we follow the waterways through our ancestral lineage to research what has happened to the people and the land there. What stories, myth and rituals have been created? Where have we come from and what remains? How do we carry ancestral trauma into the world we live in today?
