A visual Saga/Spaghetti Western Rock Opera in fourteen chapters about Desire and America.

1) Prologue - One Two Three One Two

2) On The Trail

3) Cowboys And Valkyries

4) Monett, Iceland

5) Marilyn Monroe

6) The Hunter And The Hunted

7) HorseMan

8) Predator

9) Grassland Prairie Something Preserve

10) The Sun Is High

11) In The Internet Of The Moon

12) Go Home

13) Nemeses

14) Epilogue - One Two Three Four Five

While working on this project I was interested in narrative as a healing tool that brings us closer to processing trauma, but also as a device that can keep us blissfully ignorant and disengaged from our bodies and our surroundings. Telling those narratives apart might be impossible because the same stories that seem to heal and empower us can be a source of destruction for the Other. My work teeters at the edge between authoritative storytelling and the breakdown of articulation.

In A Ride West, based on a horse ride across America that I attempted in the summer 2013 and which I consider a durational performance, I utilize the circular model of the Hero(ine)’s Journey as a container for three main strands: the romantic/violent narratives associated with the American West; my personal story, as an immigrant who had never felt at home in her own home, of permanent longing for place and partnership; the violent mythology of those early explorers who, setting forth from Iceland, tried and failed to colonize the American continent a thousand years ago.

Through an episodic structure that is propelled froward by song and spoken word and held together by its very inconsistency of style and the contrapuntal relationship between images and text, the work ultimately reveals itself, in its compulsion to articulate the (erotic) longing and aggression at its core, as an attempt at conciliating the masculine archetype, the Animus, as theorized by Carl Gustav Jung and his followers.

An unresolved archetype appears to us as external, embodied in people outside ourselves. America’s most entrenched fears (which translate in lethal defensiveness) might stem from the outside projection of an aggressive, patriarchal archetype that could have been functional (albeit deadly for indigenous cultures) when this country was perceived as a scary wilderness that needed conquering but that is now at the base of ideologies that are threatening our very survival as a species. Recognizing the Other as internal can stop the cycle of fear, hate and violence. A Ride West illustrates such attempt but it is also just the story of a journey through America.