THE NINE DREAMS / blake & the apocalypse: an interactive performance / THE SILOS AT SAWYER YARDS / two nights: fri 14 & sat 15 april / HOUSTON (tx)

THE NINE DREAMS / BLAKE & THE APOCALYPSE:
A multidisciplinary performance of William Blake’s unfinished epic masterpiece Vala.

Blake writes:

I have planted a false oath in the earth, it has brought forth a poison tree.

Blake began Vala at the dawn of the industrial age, when factories began billowing smoke over London—among other timely themes, the poem prophesizes the ecological devastation that was to follow. Blake abandoned the project ten years later, yet it remains his “most extraordinary achievement” (G.E. Bentley, Jr.). The poem also warns against various contemporary dangers, from chattel slavery (as practiced at the time in England), to unregulated capitalism, to authoritarianism, to anything that limits the imagination.

Northrup Frye writes: “There is nothing like the colossal explosion of creative power in the Ninth Night of The Four Zoas [Vala] anywhere else in English poetry.”