Process

The End of the World grew out of two inspirations: a strong cultural preoccupation in the
1980’s with the possibility of nuclear annihilation and Iris Rose’s interest in comparative
religion. Iris was descended from clergy on both sides of her family, and her extended
family was quite religious, though her nuclear family was not. Perhaps due to this familial
tension between faith and doubt, Iris developed a curiosity about different religious beliefs
and, in the early 1980’s, became a fan of Joseph Campbell’s four-volume study of
comparative mythologies, The Masks of God. She had even taken the third volume,
Occidental Mythology, to Europe on her honeymoon and read Campbell’s take on Christian
symbolism while visiting the great cathedrals of Italy and France.

Although predictions of the Earth’s imminent demise have been common throughout human
history, in the early years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency there was an increased awareness
of the possibility of nuclear war and its potential for global destruction. This fear was fed in
part by the publication and popularity of Jonathan Schell’s bestseller The Fate of the Earth,
which detailed the consequences of a nuclear explosion. Iris used this cultural zeitgeist as
the starting point for The End of the World

Iris’ initial concept was vague; under “Research Topics” on the first page of her notebook,
she included “studies into chaos”, “interview small children”, “light and spectrography”, and
“Tierra del Fuego.” Early rehearsals were really discussions; Iris, Kurt Fulton, Kim X Knowlton, and Maggie Siena brought in research, lists, musings, and big ideas concerning science, nature, and art, especially, but not exclusively, as they related to the end of the world. Kim’s explanations of scientific concepts were especially enlightening; Geology had been her major in college, so she was the designated scientist of the group. To find out what happens to the body after death, Kim called the city’s Medical Examiner’s office for the straight story and later shared her findings.

Besides assigning topics to explore – including cycles in nature and culture, the moon and
the sun, differences between males and females, sex and birth, and “the best things in life” –
Iris sometimes delegated specific writing assignments. She asked Kurt and Maggie, for
example, to each write about the death of a star – for Maggie, the death of a star such as
our sun; for Kurt, the death of a movie star. They brought the results to rehearsal and read
them aloud, and Iris eventually used them for the text of Death of a Star, the final section of
The End of the World.

While amassing these lists and research reports, Iris kept her eyes open for images and ideas
that would give the show a shape. They soon began to emerge, and one of her first
decisions was selecting four possible ends for the world to explore in depth from the 20 they
had imagined and committed to paper: nuclear war, Armageddon, a meteor or comet that
causes extreme climate change, and the death of the sun.

Iris also decided to pair each of the apocalypses with a specific philosophical point of view:
nuclear war with science, Armageddon with Western religion, a meteor with Eastern religion,
and the death of the sun with primitive man. As the show took shape, however, the third
possible end on that list became much less explicit. The traditional Eastern wisdom Iris
harvested from Campbell’s Oriental Mythology suggested that any end could also be looked
at as merely the beginning of something else. As a result, the dominant concept for PART
THREE became the cycle, and the first idea from the discussions to be transformed into action
was a “round”, both musical and physical, with lyrics that expressed the concept of
circularity. The movements were Emblems for cycles found in nature: Seasons, the Moon,
Life, and Plants.

The eventual twenty sections that made up The End of the World – five for each of the four
parts – were not created in the order in which they were later performed, but rather as each
concept came together. The next section for which the group created movement was the
obvious one that without question had to be included: The Bomb. Many of Watchface’s
usual techniques were used: Emblems based on specific images from The Fate of the Earth
and John Hersey’s Hiroshima – My Baby is Dead, Broken Glass, Bleeding Eyes – were used to
create Abstractions or were blended and altered using an improvisation technique called
Triangles; Frankensteins were also devised for abstract concepts like Red and Space. Given
this wealth of physical imagery with varying degrees of specificity, the choreography for The
Bomb was dense and disturbing. The Bomb choreography chart

Like The Bomb, for many of the sections in The End of the World, Iris used multiple techniques,
or multiple steps to alter a technique, in order to create as much complexity as possible in
tackling big subjects like nuclear war, the Tribulation, or the laws of existence. This was
especially challenging since she was relying on only three performers to carry most of the
physical/visual impact of the piece. In general, though with exceptions, Iris was the voice of
the piece, and Kim, Kurt, and Maggie provided the movements.

One of the most popular sections of the show was actually the simplest in terms of
movement, because the simplicity and mindfulness of the Japanese tea ceremony were its
inspiration. For Tea Ceremony, the four simultaneously listed the actions they did on a
typical day as part of their routine into a tape recorder. These lists provided the basis for the
text and the movements, turned into minimal Walter Kendall Fives. For the Dance of
Celebration, similarly, they wrote lists of “the best things in the world,” and these were turned into a
script and brief, simplified Emblems that were choreographed into a joyous dance.
Recordings of both the Tea Ceremony exercise and the full “best things in the world” lists can be
heard on the Audio page. Dance of Celebration choreography

Each of the performers also had a solo section, in which he or she was the only one moving.
For Kim’s solo, she and Iris selected bits of text from The New York Times’ Science Times
column to represent different branches of science: Chemistry, Geology, Psychology,
Genetics, Physics, Ecology, Biology, and Astronomy. Kim illustrated each physically with
Emblems representing those disciplines, continuing her actions during both Iris’ questions and
Kim’s answers. This section became the first in the show and was called Q. and A. Kim also
had a second, different kind of solo in PART FOUR. She wrote an explanation of the
difference between Newton and Einstein, and she alone provided that elucidation for the
audience, without movement.

To research Maggie’s solo, Animals, she and Iris had originally planned to spend a day at the
Bronx Zoo. Unfortunately, on the day of their field trip, it rained, so instead they spent the day
at the Museum of Natural History, closely observing the immobile taxidermy animals in their
glass vitrines for many hours. Their detailed notes – divided into “physical differences”,
“movement”, “social orientation”, and “sensory specialties” – provided the basis for both the
text and the movements.

Kurt’s solo, Art, was one of the last sections to be created. He and Iris talked about why
people create and what makes humans specifically inclined/compelled to do so. The
answers ranged from humans having opposable thumbs to their awareness of death and
resulting desire for a form of immortality. Iris used these ideas to compose the text and Kurt,
independently, employed the same ideas to create Emblems, which together they used to
choreograph his solo. Art text

The creation of The End of the World, from earliest discussion to final rehearsals, covered a
period of five months. As it was assembled, James Siena composed the music, attempting
to evoke both the tone of each section, and, in many cases, its cultural reference – church,
tribal or Asian culture, etc. James was primarily a painter and performance artist, but he
also played music on easily portable instruments like the concertina, the ukulele, and toy
instruments including toy piano and xylophone. For this piece, he also used cardboard
tubes for drumming and his own voice.

Working on The End of the World, with its long gestation period and weighty concepts,
allowed the cast to examine their own relationship to mortality, spirituality, and other issues
that are easier to push aside in the pressures of day-to-day life. Kurt remembers, “This show
had a big effect on me. It revealed a lot of things to me and made me come to concrete
decisions about things like what role religion and spirituality played in my life, which I had
only vague opinions on up until that time.”