Materia Obscura: Dark Matter and the World Beneath
And so it was that the Truppe Fledermaus, that fungible troop of cabaret performers, came to town of Lead, situated as it is in the granite batholith uplift of the original Dakota nation, dressed in the finery of Owl and Hermes to search for traces of Materia Obscura, that philosopher’s dust also known as dark matter. Through the dark warrens burrowed below the municipality we marched, our ears filled with the music of jack leg and tailings drip, such that we might fill the cisterns of our skulls with the elixir of Xenos, the stranger, where in the very depths we might commune with the invisible one who passes silent and massive through the illusionary objects that comprise our brief existence in this mortal coil. Here, in the sacred halle, we conversed with the philosophers and guides of that dread place and fixed our minds on those very smallest beings of our world, listening for any arcane knowledge they might impart to us. Thus initiated we rode the slimy box of pine and fir back to the surface, and beyond, to the furnaces and engines that glister above us, the button world, and here danced with the denizens of that infinite plain, presided over by Mr. Buttons himself, death, that darkness that was birthed at the beginning of time and provides the faint song that is forever echoing in our tympanic membrane, beckoning us back, back, to the nebulae and towers of ash that lie beyond the spiral’s arms and at its heart. Our ears now echoing with the music of the Materia Obscura, we awoke as if from a dream on the siltstone and shale barrens of a vanished ocean, and wandering lost, wondered why the Gods had appeared to have forsaken us, and alone in that terrible place, donned those masks of beaten gold and combed feather ourselves and danced in pain and ecstasy to the flat and unforgiving sky of this, the original nation.
The Truppe Fledermaus’ latest project, ‘Materia Obscura: Dark Matter and the World Beneath’ explores the concept of dark matter, which along with its sibling dark energy, is thought to comprise 95% of the implied energy/mass content of the universe. This exploration was at a residency performed at the behest of the Sanford Underground Research Facility, an underground laboratory located in a former gold mine in Lead, South Dakota that houses multiple experiments in areas such as dark matter and neutrino physics research, biology, geology and engineering. In response, the Truppe created their own mythology around these theoretical dark matter particles, and through this lens, toured the mine, visited surrounding caves, explored the environs above ground such as the town of Lead, the Black Hills, and the Badlands, observed extreme weather phenomena such as thunderheads, wind events, and hail storms, to create a body of work culminating in a cinematic mosaic of over 150 photographs, with a rearrangeable poetic labyrinth printed on the verso. Huzzah!
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Columbarium/Purgatorium
Within the sepulchre (that is to say: the world at large), Death, in his dis-incarnation as the Pearly King Mr Buttons, staged a nomadic Danse Macabre for those of an apocalyptic disposition . . .
The process was roughly as follows: after the pandemic, the Truppe Fledermaus were invited (by whom!?) to spend a year and a half traveling the land performing residencies, so they packed up the Mr Buttons costume into a suitcase and had the attendees perform the Danse Macabre with them at the various locales they visited, dressed in costumes appropriate to their respective regional customs. For instance, when the Truppe rolled onto the plains Laredo, they found that everyone seemed to secretly possess Western Wear (what one might call a cowboy outfit); another residency near the Pyrenees was located next to the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route, so participants dressed in traditional Breton pilgrim’s outfits; in the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Truppe were sent a mile below the earth’s surface to be educated about dark matter, so created costumes around the classical mythology of psychopomps; and so on. In between these outings, they staged their own Danse Macabres on the theme of being aging fools suffering the initial humiliations of old age. It was found that in the wake of the plague, a certain hysteria had bubbled up in the various places they traveled, and people seemed curiously eager to have their turn attempting to defy Mr Buttons in the various dance-offs. Did they succeed? Only time will tell . . .
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Ludus Mortis
The Danse Macabre, or Game of Death, conceived of as portable property, with the diamonds represented as fools, the spades as revolutionaries, the hearts as lovers, and the clubs as beasts, all a-dance on the cracking ice floes and decaying balustrades of our dream lives . . .
