«If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thru’ narrow chinks of his cavern.»

William Blake (1757-1827), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [1790].

The very particular characteristics of the project “The Doors of Perception” make it run across several vectors of MARIONET’s activity. As well as in science, where we find no definite frontiers between areas of knowledge, and in the arts we find the words interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary being commonly used, also in our activity there’s a natural permeability in the frontier regions where content, form and methods mingle. The Doors of Perception appears in this context and exists as an artistic product belonging to this border region of our activity where we intend to open paths to the future.

The idea for this Project departing from Blake came from the then director of TAGV, Manuel Portela, professor of the Grupo de Estudos Anglo-Americanos of the Faculdade de Letras of Universidade de Coimbra, translator of several works of Blake and, in particular, of his illuminated poems, whose singularity concerning their poetic content and the multiplicity of their creation process make them desirable fruits to a transdisciplinary performance.

SYNOPSIS

Just like in the illuminated poems of William Blake, where text and image work together in the production of meaning, the selection of texts chosen by Manuel Portela created for us a particular world within the visionary cosmogony of Blake. Here we found ideas of freedom for the bodies and the emotions in the form of a new Genesis. A world without absolute scale and time, where the birth of a man is simultaneously the original explosion which generated the finite world. Mind and body are one and closed in the five finite senses. Before it was the infinite and only will determined form. After the fall from Eternity, we were condemned to the limits of the material world we can perceive. Secular institutions like the Church, the State, and part of the scientific community, try to organize this perception in order to legitimate their laws with measures and calculations.

To clean the doors of perception will allow to contemplate this conspiracy but also to find the individual incapable of obeying – the unlimited man, who will suffer complexity without hiding behind the horizon.