Daniel Alexander Jones I Choose to Remember Us Whole (Altar no 3)

“I Choose to Remember Us Whole (Altar no 3)”, a project by Daniel Alexander Jones

On a sunny midday in May, I joined about 50 people for a procession sponsored by Meany Center for the Performing Arts that was part of “I Choose to Remember Us Whole (Altar no 3).” Daniel Alexander Jones, an artist, theatre artist, singer, performance artist, and educator, imagined the idea and invited Seattle artists to collaborate. The title suggests the purpose, healing by reconnecting to unseen forces.

The performance began at the Henry Art Gallery with the artist singing about wholeness, accompanied by Walter Kitundu playing a harp like instrument.

We were encouraged to wear earthy colors: I wore a bright green tee shirt from my Qi Gong class (which turned out to be the perfect prelude to the afternoon). A number of young women dressed in various shades of yellow began to dance. A drum beat signaled the beginning of the procession. As we passed through some trees the dancers reached to the sky then to the earth. It was a gesture familiar to me from QiGong, receiving positive energy from trees and giving stale energy back to the earth.

“I Choose to Remember Us Whole (Altar no 3)” is a new iteration of a project that Jones created at Cal Arts Center for New Performance called ALTARED STATES which:

“invites participants into an intentional relationship with unseen forces that shape our lived realities, including waves of history, culture, cosmology, and Soul. Altars have traditionally served as meeting places between the material and the numinous, among and across a range of cultures and artistic forms.”

Our invitation to wholeness embraced these forces. “What would it feel like to remember and to be remembered as whole beings? What would change? What would enable wholeness? And what can we do to embrace as whole what now seems irrevocably torn asunder? “

That’s the artist in yellow, and Valerie Curtis Newton on the left.

Valerie Curtis-Newton, the head of the Drama Department at UW,

greeted us at the “The Wisdom Walk”, in the courtyard of the art building. We were asked to take a prompt, walk a labyrinth and write in a book at the center of the labyrinth in response to the prompt. My prompt was “what do you wish someone had told you when you were five years old?”

Diana Garcia-Snyder head of Dance department and her students

led us throughout the procession and performed periodically.IMG_2893

Our second stop “Altar to Interdimensional Entanglements” by Afroditi Psarra, a (Multidisciplinary Artist and Associate Professor, UW Digital Arts and Experimental Media DXARTS) intervened in a preexisting public art installation of metal chairs set in open metal structures. Afroditi (who is Greek – Aphrodite, Goddess of Love!) hung knitted fabrics as portals on the scaffolding of the outdoor rooms. Collaborating with AI (!) through prompts such as “black holes” and “warped passage,” she knitted patterns. Each hanging composed a different sound when we stroked the fabric.

That’s the artist dressed in yellow

Not far away at Leon Finley’s “Altar to the Death of the Sun” we were asked to think for a minute about “what will we become when the sun burns out”. We faced West across this walll covered with dirt and spoke our answer out loud.

The fourth destination Altheo Rao’s “Chestful of Whispers” at the UW Farm near the southwest corner of the campus, focused on fertility with history, poetry and planting seeds.

Then the procession wound its way to the end of Rainier Vista for the grand finale: Timothy White Eagle’s “Sacrificier Les Vivants” (sacrifice the living). White Eagle has long experience with ritual performances: we experienced death and resurrection through stories, and actions. Here IMG_2908 is a short clip. Finally, he offered us fireweed tea brewed from the first plant to grow back after a forest fire.

So we experienced a sequence of rituals that expanded our spiritual and emotional wellbeing. As a mystic, Daniel Alexander Jones seeks to collaborate in our recovery after the shattering events of the pandemic. Instead of presenting his own experience through art, we were expected to be part of the process of exploration.

Fortunately my Qi Gong practice works with unseen energy (Qi) in our organs, bones, and spirits: a good foundation for a procession to wholeness. I have not achieved wholeness of course, but this event was another step in the process.

Post script

Until July 9, the Henry Art Gallery displayed an altar that was the starting point for Altar no 3 ( sorry no image) , a collaboration with several artists from WaNaWari, expanded with parts of the five altars that we visited. You can contribute to this installation by writing about “what would it feel like to remember and to be remembered as whole beings? What would change? What would enable wholeness?”

The installations at the Henry Art Gallery included these artists , a [ublic participation piece well as WaNaWari artists