Jon Lebkowsky sez, “My amazing friend, neurocomputing specialist, musician & composer David Demaris has created the most geek-tastic opera ever, For Fear the Glass May Shatter. It’s been produced as part of Austin’s Fusebox Festival, and is running through this weekend at the Vortex Theatre here.”
The biography of Wolfgang Pauli is a particle dancing through a deflector beam modulated by an extended mashup of Faust (Goethe, Mann’s Dr. Faustus), Quantum Mechanics, Jungian Alchemy and Taoism. Pauli, Bohr, Heisenberg, Jung, and others transmute through various roles in Faust like particles in a chamber exposed to myth waves. It veers in and out of history of science realism, dream, magical realism, and literary disruptions, allowing each viewer to collapse its wave function in unique fashion. Unlike Joyce’s characters in Ulysses, these scholars are utterly aware of their governing myth Faust and invoke it every chance they get. The actors are singing science, the mythic tale of the birth of quantum mechanics, the hidden forces of number archetypes, and their longing for love and immortality.
I’ve portrayed Pauli as a poet of the unique – aware of the limitations of mid-century physics deal with the contingent and improbable nature of life and the mind. He, along with Jung, imagined a reformation of religion and science; in Pauli’s dream of the New House, laboratory, university and cathedral are joined. I imagine this as a kind of alternate reality in which possibly disruptive scientific advances are birthed in a ritual form capturing a culture’s most glorious achievements and darkest moments.
For Fear The Glass May Shatter
(Thanks, Jon!)