Myths are human truths. For literally thousands of years they have inspired artists, poets, states people, historians, teachers, parents, children, indeed, all people who are moved by story. As opposed to lecturing at people, myths entice and enchant, instill wonder and delight, help to cope with loss, in short: they are narrative maps helping people to navigate the journey of their lives. And because they are formed of metaphor and filled with poetic insight, they are an integral part of teaching people to think creatively and critically. In a world where young people are bombarded with media and consumerist messages at every turn, myths can help them to think for themselves, to pierce beyond the veil of symbolic narratives, help them better discern lives of quality and delight for themselves, their families, and the societies that they themselves will grow up to shape.
RecombinantDNA is a performance cycle created by multi-media artist Honora Foà. The first piece in the cycle is The Birth of Color, A Marriage of Darkness and Light, a creation story that pictures the opening of the universe as an unfolding of vibrational frequencies, as is told in the ancient Indian Vedas. But this opera uses new scientific understandings of dark matter and dark energy, the insights of Goethe’s color theory of perception and the joys of the latest astrophysics, as the illustration of its tale.
The story is told with narration, but the whole Frequency Opera is essentially an oratorio, with music written by Lucio Ivaldi. The audience is surrounded by the singers and by lights, lasers and projections which immerse them in an unfolding octave and spectrum, as the colors come into being.
The Birth of Color, A Marriage of Darkness & Light was performed in Budapest as an official selection of the Budapest International Art Festival in 2016.
Field of Desire, the second Frequency Opera, is an animated hour long film that is currently making the film festival rounds, having been chosen for three festivals to date.
Mr&MrsHades and Blood&Breath are both in production. Blood&Breath will have its premiere in Rome, Italy in October 2023.
The works in the RecombinantDNA cycle are
THE BIRTH OF COLOR, A Marriage of Darkness&Light
FIELD OF DESIRE, A Marriage of Energy&Matter
MR&MRS HADES, A Marriage of Death&Life
BLOOD&BREATH
VIKTOR&ELIZABETH
WHERE THE HANDS GO, THE EYES GO
PARADISE TREES
All are love stories, whose underlying image is the genius and sacrifice of sexual reproduction and the ever more breathtaking wonder of DNA.
A new partnership with Georgia Tech on the entire Recombinant DNA performance cycle is generating a lot of enthusiasm. The first piece in the cycle, the Frequency Opera, The Birth of Color, A Marriage of Darkness and Light, is well under way with a recording of 81 separate tracks completed. The arduous and magical process of creating a world of sound in order to fully immerse everyone in the frequencies is on.
The 2nd Frequency Opera in the Recombinant DNA cycle is based on the ancient Indian story of Siva’s first consort, Sati, and the dawning of sex.
Coloured scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of sperm clustered on the surface of a fertilised human egg (ovum). The round egg (green) is at the zygote stage. Although the egg is already fertilised sperm are still attached to it.
Every culture, every people, every religion is an accumulation of its stories, legends and myths. It is these myths — told and retold from generation to generation — that help us to understand each other, to structure our lives, and to navigate the future.
Every life is a story and a story can change the world.
Hidden away in the inner nature of the real person is the law of his life. – Emerson
If the work that you’re doing is the work that you chose to do because you are enjoying it, that’s it. But if you think, ‘Oh, no! I couldn’t do that!’ that’s the dragon locking you in.”– Joseph Campbell, from The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers
Mission Statement
Mythic Imagination Institute is a 501c3 social profit enterprise whose purpose of is to reunite people, primarily through art and immersion, to the accumulated wisdom of humankind that lives in stories and mythology and thereby to:
• Encourage creative response and imagination
• Help to make sense of our individual lives by seeing the stories within them
• Inspire and produce new works of art
• Engender understanding and respect for others
• Serve as a free zone for inter-disciplinary conversation and activity
• Foster a diverse community whose common knowledge of the world’s stories creates an unusual ability to transcend boundaries and take pleasure in difference
• Nurture and grow the imagination through the understanding and the making of metaphor
• Cultivate experiences and activities of mythology, archetype, and narrative
• Make friends.
Mythic Imagination Institute’s events are full of life, unique learning and people who do fascinating, provocative, meaningful work. Participants include everyone from Nobel Peace Prize Laureates to a Mayan shaman; US senators to organic farmers; musicians, teachers, designers, doctors, NGO workers.
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MII creates and sponsors projects. Our first signature project has been the MythicJourneys Performance Festivals & Conferences. (These have become legendary in and of themselves.) The festival conferences bring together a wide group of people from different disciplines, cultures and professions. Mythic Imagination also produces
Mythic Imagination Board of Directors
Dahlan Robert Foah Chairman of the Board
Honora Foah President and Creative Director of Mythic Imagination Institute
Ty Defoe
Maureen Eke
Katherine Freer
Ari Berk Chair of the Content Committee for Mythic Imagination
Mythic Imagination Advisory Board
Dr. James Hillman; Honorary Chairman in memorium
Dr. Michael Vannoy Adams
Rebecca Armstrong, M. Div.
Dr. Coleman Barks
Phil Cousineau
Dr. Nor Hall
Dr Sam Keen
Dr. Stephen Larsen
John and Caitlin Matthews
Cathy Sheperd, MA
Dr. Bradd Shore
Dr. Chris Synder
Charles Vess
Robert Walter
Terri Windling
Jane Yolen Michael Karlin Founder of Mythic Imagination Institute
How is it possible to retain our humanity in the worst of all circumstances? When everything is taken, what allows us to survive not only, or not even, in body, but in spirit?
Here is an amazing film made in New Zealand in 2007 that brings a sense of the warrior in a more stripped down essential way than modern, technological warfare:
BLOOD MERIDIAN
Philosopher John Gray on violence in human nature by way of Cormac McCarthy.
Angels and ghost may be more truthful than a …newspaper.
THE JUNG SOCIETY OF AMERICA
Why is it that despite the fact that the Self presents us with a gift and a destiny, of a potential waiting to be expressed, that we often neglect to attend to all that is needed to bring this aspect of the Transcendent to fruition? Read More
JAMES HILLMAN
James Hillman, the godfather of Mythic Imagination Institute, died Wednesday, October 26th. There is a hole in the firmament… Read More
URDU STORYTELLING
Wonderful conversation about storytelling, fantasy, politics and meaning from a man who is a leader in the revival of Urdu storytelling… Read More
APOCALYPSE NOW
Some of the most important forces affecting us every day are myths… Read More
APOCALYPSE NOT NOW
As the new year begins, the sun is reborn… Visit Site
The week of June 7th – June 15th, 2014, The Birth of Color, A Marriage of Darkness and Lightwill be recorded with a 60 person chorus in Budapest Hungary.
The Birth of Color is one of the original inspirations for the Mythic Journeys Arts Festivals and Conferences but was itself delayed in production in order to produce the first Mythic Journeys. This recording is the precursor to the full performance anticipated in Atlanta, Georgia in 2015.
The gorgeous Teatro Principal, the oldest opera house in North America, will be the setting for the latest Creativity in Captivity concert. The stories of the composers are narrated in between a wide range of musical styles, sensibilities and moods that evoke the earned humanity of people living in the most wretched circumstances, yet still defiantly creating.
We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned
so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
– Joseph Campbell
Bob Walter’s visit to Atlanta was inspiring in all ways – his talks and conversations, the gathering of people that came together to deepen each other’s lives and the film itself. The film series with speakers and artists will continue in 2014.
FINDING JOE
SEPTEMBER 12th, 2013
with Special Guest
BOB WALTER
President of the Joseph Campbell Foundation
Lefont Theatre
Lefont Sandy Springs
5920 Roswell Rd., Ste. C-103
Atlanta, GA 30328
Help get it going! Buy your ticket and other good things through the Kickstarter campaign:
The most important thing that myths teach us is to go beyond
the limits of our possibility.
Robert Walter, president of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, speaks eloquently in the above excerpt from the inspiring new movie, Finding Joe. Finding Joe is about the work and impact of Joseph Campbell, the most influential mythologist in history.
On September 12th, we plan to show Finding Joe at Atlanta’s Lefont Theater surrounding it with a day of discussion on mythology and how it applies to our lives.
Here is the schedule for September 12th:
1:00 pm — Lunch with Bob for the Kickstarter level-six pledgers
4:00 – 5:30 pm — Conversation with Robert Walter and Honora Foah on Revisioning the Hero at the Phoenix and Dragon Bookstore
“I think of the story, the history, as a myth. The film has to do with mythical truth, not historical truth; it has to do with man taking over the world on his own terms for the first time,” Boorman explains.
“What I’m doing is setting it in a world, a period, of the imagination. I’m trying to suggest a kind of Middle Earth, in Tolkien terms. It’s a contiguous world; it’s like ours but different. I want it to have a primal clarity, a sense that things are happening for the first time.”
June 14th at the Plaza Theatre at the corner of Ponce de Leon and Highland in Atlanta, Mythic Imagination will present our second film in the Mythic Movies Series: STARDUST.
Written by Neil Gaiman and directed by Matthew Vaughn Stardust is the tale of a fallen star who crashes into an otherworldly kingdom and inflames a diverse crew of seekers with a diverse group of desires, which they all think can be fulfilled by capturing her.They want the star for love, power, eternal youth and riches—but what does the star want? Damaged by her fall, the star is in terrible danger. Kings and pirates, The cast:
Claire Danes
Peter O’Toole
Michelle Pfeiffer
Robert De Niro
Ricky Gervais
Sienna Miller
Rupert Everett
Charlie Cox…
Testaments of the Heart was exactly that. Performed at the Schwartz Center on Emory University’s campus on September 28th, it rescued a corner of the story of the Holocaust from cliché and ignorance and false familiarity.To be in the room as music that has been in suspended animation for 70 years, suddenly comes alive through the extraordinary talents of members of the Atlanta Symphony, the St Philips Cathedral choir, Maestro Michael Palmer, actress Janice Akers, pianist Will Ransom, Soapbox Studios and many others, was to be changed, to be witness to what is possible, and ultimately what is necessary….
In the worst of all circumstances how is it possible to retain our humanity? September 28, 2010, Mythic Imagination will inaugurate a year-long program, Creativity in Captivity. The opening evening of September 28th will be a concert at the Schwartz Center at Emory University in Atlanta. The music was all written by people inside the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Dr Francesco Lotoro has spent the last 18 years racing against the dissolving history of the Holocaust to find, document, copy…
The mythic journey of Steve and Whitney Boe that began with their stumbling into the Mythic Journeys Conference and Performance Festival in 2006 has become the film Mythic Journeys. It has been officially released this April and is now available for sale and for screenings. The screenings of the film have become events in themselves. Please check with us to see when there are screenings and ancillary events in your area…
