MOONCHILD

director's note:

How do you define love? Outside of cliché and cynicism, how do you even begin to shed light on a notion whose currency is mystery itself? Furthermore--How would you define perfect love? Does it exist at all? Or does the term negate itself?

It is these questions that have driven the exploration and creation of this work. Questions that inevitably led us to mythology. Joseph Campbell speaks of mythology as a "manifestation of our greatest dreams, our greatest fears and our reality..." He goes on to say that "myth is the reconciliation and realization that dreams, fears and reality are present in every one of our actions..."--an utterly apropos thesis.

Though there are certainly endless myths that wrestle with notions of love--it became important to look at this question from a comparative standpoint rather than simply a mono-cultural one. Accordingly we looked at myths that have traveled over vast histories and geographies. Nowhere is this more present than in the various gypsy migrations of India. These migrations traveled large groups from the southern sub-Himalayan peninsula through the Middle East, North Africa and ultimately Eastern and Western Europe. And with these groups came their stories of love--filled with dreams, fears and reality.

These stories in turn revealed two essential ideas. First and foremost was the realization that it is in celebrating the inherent contradictions and imperfections of love that one comes closer to understanding it. And secondly, the notion that love myths, more often than not, are attached and equated with majestic natural mysteries--more specifically with the moon.

And so the creation of this work began to solidify around adapting and retelling these moon myths. Born out of secrets made deep in the silence of the night, and dreams kept close to the heart, Moonchild sets out to manifest love as a landscape of faith and superstition, of vows and prophecies, of despair and hope, a landscape consumed with blinding, blissful and utter madness.

-Rubén Polendo, Spring 2007