Source Artistic Blind Date: Fox Cried

Joseph Campbell once said that a myth was a public dream, and a dream was a private myth. In the mountains of Peru, or else in someone’s mind, there is a myth about a fox, a crow and a hare. It is obscure, bloody and full of remorse, and so is a path to the dreaming human heart.

In the upstairs performance space of the Source Festival, three cultural anthropologists, or else composer Ethan Foote, theater artist Jack Novak, and visual artist Jane Clare Remick, bring this public dream to life. Foote and Remick are in masks; Novak, all stutters and index cards, will provide commentary.

We have a live feed. There is a camera and an enormous television screen. The camera is pointed at us, sitting in the lecture hall. (If you sit in the front row on the extreme right side, the camera will point right at you and you will be front and center on the screen. I’m just saying.) Novak begins to speak, and Remick and Foote begin the dance of hare and crow.

It is charmingly artless. The wrong slide appears on the television screen. Novak loses his place. The screen, with camera focused on the dancers, shows their gliding movements. Then it shows something else.

Then the bad things happen.

“Good Christ, we need new forms, new passions, new work, new ideas,” Con rails in Stupid Fucking Bird. “New forms of theater that can actually make you feel like living better or fuller or…more!”

Well, Con, I guess you’re right, if the new forms still honor narrative structure, still give a narrative arc, still tell a story.

Fox Cried, like the other Artistic Blind Dates, is meant to illuminate one of the full-length plays: in this case, A Frontier, as told by the Frontier. But this blind date also – and this is why I’m recommending it – tells a story. A hell of a story.

It tells our story – the story of the dreaming human heart, obscure, bloody, and full of remorse.