Imagine, if you will, waking up one day to find yourself immersed in a performance that is all about you. Now imagine that you are the main character in that performance, that it goes on for months, that it takes place in your home, at your workplace, all over the city where you live, and that the other characters are your friends and family and a mysterious group of artists, most of whom you’ve never even met. This is Odyssey Works, and if this is happening to you it is because, some six months earlier, you were selected to be our sole audience member from more than one hundred applicants.
 
In 2002, I began the Odyssey Works project and have since worked with hundreds of artists in attempting to find a way to make more meaningful and impactful work. An Odyssey Works production is more than just a performance, it is a seamless infiltration of narrative and aesthetic themes into a person’s life. My team writes and publishes books claiming to have been written by the likes of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, then hacks Wikipedia and even the New York Times to validate their authenticity. They also compose scores, create plastic objects, take over hardware stores, cafes, even former military ships in an effort to transform the mundane world into one rich with story and meaning. An Odyssey Works participant may find that all the new people he has been meeting have turned out to be actors, and that they are leading him to understand the city as a large map by walking across it carrying nothing but a rock, and that later he will be blindfolded and kidnapped and then taken to the woods where tinder is piled about his feet and that he’s tied to a stake, about to be burned alive. Or he’ll find himself nailed in a coffin, or awakening in a new life in a new home with people he’s never met posing as his new family. Or something else.

My most recent production, which took place in November of 2016 in New York, Baltimore, and Virginia over a week long period, was called Pilgrimage because it was structured in many ways as a pilgrimage. 

Pilgrimage was also my first production since moving to Baltimore - first, I hope, of many. It was a wonderful opportunity to work with local artists (such as Graham Coreil-Allen, Laura Wexler, and Nate Brown) and to engage the sublime mysteries of my new home. It was also my first chance to work with Dare Turner, whose Native American (Yurock) heritage and her expertise in medieval pilgrimage rites heavily influenced the work.

Pilgrimage was a pilgrimage. Ayden LeRoux, for whom the performance was made, was facing many life changes - imminent surgeries, the threat of breast cancer before the age of 30, changing jobs, moving out of state, finding her life path. She was also someone who had recently taken a tour of the land art of the American West and found it to be deeply spiritual. Pilgrimage was something that was on her mind, and it seemed she should take a properly structured pilgrimage. 

It would be too much to describe the performance as a whole (if you would like a full narration, you can check out the incredible essay written by Maura Callahan in the January 2017 cover story for the Baltimore City paper here), but I would be remiss if I didn't introduce the project with a little more about the pilgrimage itself. Working closely with Turner, we studied the specific structures of pilgrimages - how pilgrims move from station to station, how they carry votive offerings to the holy sites, how the holy sites are shrouded in myth, how pilgrims accumulate badges and pendants, and how the clothes pilgrims wear are designed to ward off evil and danger. We found, amazingly, that many of these practices tracked with Turner's own Native traditions, and we worked with her mother to create regalia and clothing that she filled with protective prayers. 

Through the more that 200 miles of her journey, as she was wrapped in peoples wishes like a cocoon in Brooklyn Bridge Park and then transported southward, as she spent the night in an unknown pilgrim house (in Baltimore) as she walked and rode trains and the light rail and hiked along rivers and canals, her pilgrimage tracked a long tradition of pilgrimages - both European and American. But the end point of her pilgrimage was something much newer, a piece of land art by Nancy Holt (arguably the only land art on the east coast). 

As Ayden walked, we walked. Everybody who was involved in the performance deeply enough went on the pilgrimage as well, offered their own votive offerings, made their own petitions.

Odyssey Works: Transformative Experiences for an Audience of One, co-written with Ayden LeRoux, is at once a handbook for innovative artmaking, an artist's monograph, an analysis of a three-month long performance, a diagram, and a non-linear exploration of nine essential themes in contemporary art and performance. The book follows When I Left the House it was Still Dark, the three month performance I directed in 2013 for author Rick Moody, and uses that performance to lay out six proposals. The proposals are:

1. Begin with Empathy
2. Involve your Audience Completely
3. Stop Pretending
4. Make Experiences not Things
5. Experiment with Form
6. Produce, Don't Reproduce

The proposals are derived from the fifteen years I have been at the helm of Odyssey Works and are intended to deepen the conversation I have had with artists over the years, though they are written for all individuals making work in any creative medium. More than anything, the book aims to help people make work that has meaning.

The book, also, is a diagram of ideas. One can read it straight through, or one can follow the colored tabs to focus on certain ideas. The table of contents is both an index of chapters and a heat map of concepts, and the reader is invited to follow her interests and personal focus through the ideas. There is a significant online component to the book, and multimedia content on my website serves to provide background and a deeper comprehension of the events discussed. Finally, the book is a call to action, inviting others to make work and to join me in creating future productions either through various remote actions or in person wherever the next production might be.

"Takes you on a creative journey that will get you rethinking your own process"
- Ellen Lupton, (Director of Graphic Design at MICA, Curator at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum)

"A deeply engaged exploration of the aesthetic experience as it exists in our lives today..."
- Eric Bogosian (actor/writer)

An additional note: The book was released on November 8, an unfortunate timing. The book release party, on November 9 was hard to imagine going to. I wrote and published this that day in an effort to consider the ethical imperative of artmaking.

This performance, which took place over a period of three months in 2013, was the longest single performance I have ever done. It is the subject of my recent book: Odyssey Works: Transformative Experiences for an Audience of One (co-authored with Ayden LeRoux).  You can read a lovely and concise description of the project on Marina Abramovic's website. 

Rather than narrate the whole timeline of Rick's performance, I'll excerpt an interview Rick (the participant) did with me for the Rumpus. it gets at some of the deeper intentions behind the production.

"My experience was numinous, strange, important, depressing, intense, annihilating, powerful, hard on my relationship, and frequently very, very moving. The whole featured dozens upon dozens of performers, some of them known to me, but others unknown and working for free, and it was mainly the highly intensive collaboration of the Odyssey Works structure team, as they call themselves, which includes not only artistic director Abraham Burickson, who is an architect, a published poet, and a former whirling dervish, but also four others, all of whom I got to know intimately."
- Rick Moody

The Rumpus: So as I understand it, this production of Odyssey Works (the one featuring myself as “audience”) was logistically among the most complex yet mounted. True or untrue? Why so complex? And did that need to expand represent an organizational wish? Did you want to get bigger?

Abraham Burickson: Certainly this was true, and it did represent an organizational wish, not specifically to get bigger, necessarily, but to put into action certain things that we’d been thinking about and working toward. Mainly these all emerge from a wish to have a piece that is more dynamic and dialogical. In the past, we would have actors infiltrate the participant’s life, and we would work toward a single weekend of performance. Like yours, these were pieces developed from our research, but unlike yours, these pieces were more or less planned in advance and then executed as planned. We wanted to set up a structure where the general intent of the piece was set, but the content and the thematic direction of the piece changed with every interaction; it was very uncertain for you—you had times and (sometimes) locations known in advance, but content was a mystery. We wanted to bring ourselves a little closer to that uncertainty, to have to respond to your interactions with the piece, and, as we were investigating themes and narratives in your life also to be investigating them in our own. In the past, this happened naturally but somewhat by the way; in this production we made investigating our own relationship to the ideas and the things you were going through central to the process. We did a great deal of writing and thinking about the themes, and we collected our writings. We also went through the same fool training that you went through with Jen, as did many of the fools from the scene at MetroTech Plaza. We wanted to focus on you, to have you at the center of the piece, but to have the investigation reach each one of us at a level approaching what we hoped for you.

There is some sense of “keeping it real” in this, because if we are investigating an idea, a theme, and thinking only of you there is the risk of remaining detached or clinical. If we are included, always, it becomes consequential; it renders the border between the theoretical and the practical, or the performative and the real, somewhat more porous. This is why, for the most part, all the narrative material we bring about ourselves is real.

Rumpus: So given that that is the case, that it’s not theater, in the traditional sense, not scripted, not improvised, not even performed (because mostly true), does it make sense to even talk about what you’re doing here as though it fits into a rubric of theater? I keep thinking of you as architect and feeling like, at least in this piece, where downtown Brooklyn was so central to the piece, that it’s more architecture than theater in some ways, more a referendum about how people are in space than an idea about what performance is, and this seems especially to the point when you consider that I spent a large portion of the piece alone in an abandoned hardware store, which had some very interesting spatial characteristics…

Burickson: I believe you said it had “an annihilating quality.” When I mentioned it to your brother he said: “Rick chooses words very carefully; if he used the word ‘quality’ it must have really piqued his interest.” Certainly, I know, it was difficult for you there, and that really gets at what we’re interested in there—a spatial quality such as annihilating, rather than a spatial quality such as tall. Rather than the formal qualities of the space, we’re interested in the nature of the relationship you have to that particular space and to what we did with it. This is really where we started with the composition of that part of the piece—with what we wanted that experience to be in that space. This was before we had Sid’s and before we had a lot of the specifics of the piece.

This is architectural, sure, and it is what I like about architecture, really, that thought process, how we can think about a building or a cityscape not in terms of the forms themselves—the walls and the concrete and the elevators and the stop signs—but in terms of how it performs, what life it is possible to live there. This gets at why categorizing the work is so tricky, not because we are so interdisciplinary but because the scenes are designed beginning with the desired audience experience—to create a sense of loneliness, for instance, or to give a sense of crescendo, or to move to an aesthetically exalting space—rather than the ultimate form. 

Laura Espino came with her mother from Argentina to this country when she was a teenager. The story of her arrival here, her learning English and overcoming immigration issues to eventually go to Berkeley and then find a life where she is able to help other immigrant families is compelling and unfinished. Now in her mid-twenties, she is bright, politically engaged, socially active, and very much in transition. Her friends see her as a success story – she is driven to have a meaningful career somewhere in education, and she is in a good, stable relationship with her partner, D.

She says that hearing is her favorite sense, and she speaks of getting completely immersed in film and literature and dancing. She is also very careful about managing her intense social life, never complaining and always taking care to make sure everyone feels cared for. She has a public persona and a private one, and likes to escape from people to watch movies or read books. She reads everything by an author, then listens to the music referenced in the books. She gets completely immersed in the stories of others, and when she is with her friends, she is politically precise, optimistic, and certain.

Working with Laura was the opportunity I didn't know I had been waiting for. How does narrative work in our lives? What are the larger and the smaller narratives? What would it be to actually see how those narratives work? The performance was that opportunity - a series of experiences that connected large, ancestral stories to stories about her own life, then to the story of what was happening in the moment, then to the single sound that encapsulated that story. It was called the narrative spiral because the stories repeated and reduced - a Borgesian experience for an Argentine fan of Borges.

The climax, which we called the Crescendo, saw all the stories fold together when a cafe full  of members of the public (trained that day) created all the sounds from her life. It was a powerful moment. 

The performance was featured in the New York Times. 

The Map is Not the Territory was made for Carl Collins, an information architect living in Brooklyn. Carl understood the world via ideas and sometimes was literally so lost in thought that he fell down the stairs, or so his friends told us in interviews. Carl’s mind worked at a fast pace; at the time when we met him he was constantly starting new projects, reading new books, meeting a group of friends every Sunday for dinner, and working three jobs. It was a struggle to relate to him. We spent months studying Carl, and along the way a few things appeared as portals to understanding him. The first was learning from his girlfriend at the time that he was brought to tears by the film Jiro Dreams of Sushi, about a man whose entire life is driven by a devotion to a single activity: making sushi. This minute thread revealed how deeply Carl respected discipline and rationality; it revealed that the devotion and purity of work ethic could bring transcendence for Carl. The second was his fascination with mapping. There was something appealing about the visual beauty and detail of maps, and the belief in the possibility that overlays of data could reveal hidden truths. Mapping, we would see through months of research, was the key to the rational and irrational sides of Carl. The final insight into him came after we asked him to keep a dream journal for a month and in it we found a small curious nugget that we latched onto. It read: “I can see myself and a map of the city. What am I searching for?”

What was he searching for indeed?

In order to find out, we thought we might bring Carl into his body, to feel the same intensity that so often was boiling in his brain, in a corporeal way. His performance was broken up into four segments — Enhanced Carlness, Removal of Carlness, The Animal, and Life on the Other Side, the first three parts necessary for the final part to work. You can see the four parts mapped out in the diagram that served as a script for the performance.

Carl's performance was more extensively detailed in The Alcalde.