February 25, 2021
THE ALCHEMIST SUITE – a commission with my libretto and film installation/projection, music by composer Veronika Krausas and voice by bass baritone Nicholas Isherwood – enjoys continued momentum over nearly a decade touring in Paris, Berlin, Italy, Los Angeles, and Vienna with new performances throughout Poland and in Warsaw in May 2021. Isherwood’s preoccupation with the complex and underrecognized historicity of alchemy in both Tibet and the Middle East fruitfully combined with Krausas’ gift for tonal complexities and a seemingly unperformable score written expressly for his vocal training. My own collection of feminist alchemical artifacts referencing the ancient mystical and scientific attempts to create gold – combined with an altered and adapted film camera – made a rather peculiar yet apparently charmingly bizarre project that just keeps traveling the world as a core work in Isherwood’s repertoire.
Watch it here! In the quarantined environment of your choice! If you can….endure the mysterious mysterioso and, well, weirdness. The snakeskin is one I tanned myself in the Anza Borrega desert (I oppose the killing of rattlesnakes, but someone already killed it so I ate it and tanned it), and the turtleshell is the remains of a childhood box turtle. Both are, of course, key ingredients in a long list of potential components that – when combined under the right circumstances – might yield gold. Even though gold only comes from………….outer space.
THE ALCHEMIST SUITE is an exploration of the arcane intersection between the practice of science and mystical spirituality within the legacy of Tibetan Bon, Judaism, and European occultism. The suite is a performance collaboration in music, film, and text between artist Quintan Ana Wikswo and composer Veronika Krausas. Wikswo’s suite of libretto poems is joined to music by composer Veronika Krausas and performed by bass baritone Nicholas Isherwood, accompanied by a suite of three original films by Wikswo.
The songs feature the King Blood Drinker, a Tibetan soothsayer whose turtle bones foretell the future; the apocryphal 15th-century mystic chemist Basil Valentine, and the legendary alchemistMarium Prophetissima, who invented Caput Mortuum, or death’s head, chemicals mixed from powdered mummies – as well as the basic instruments of modern chemistry.
Nicholas Isherwood, bass baritone, plays the rin, frog guiro, turtle maracas and tanpura.
– Catalysis Projects Los Angeles
