Empedocles Syndrome

A performance lecture excavated from research for the proposed feature film The Empedocles Clause, which charts two voyages up Mt Etna separated by 2500 years, and draws on an exciting new archaeological discovery. 

‘I am going to tell you what I am going to do and then I am going to do it. First I will deliver an essay about proto forms, about Pre Socratics and Early Cinema, Tristram Shandy and Photogrammetry, it will be a dense tangle of references. Then it will break down. It will become a kind of preverbal guttural song, not comprehensible in rational terms. From this soup, a poem will be born, a poem about Empedocles, as a woman, waking up from a feast thrown in her honour for bringing an old lady back from the dead, only to realise that she is a fraud, that her philosophy is fantasy, and running up Mt Etna to incinerate herself in shame. Then I will dress as her, dance a little and leave the building. But while I am speaking you will forget all of this, and the whole thing, the texture of its unfolding, will come as a surprise. 

Ok. So here goes.’