The Cortège: A Festive Funeral For Our Times
Unfolding at dusk, The Cortège is a three-hour experience anchored by a 60-minute procession that revives the lost arts of mythic pageantry. The evening begins with an open-air food market and live musical prelude. As twilight descends, audiences embark on a sonic voyage through choreographed movement, archetypal costuming, drone apparitions, puppetry, robotics, and participation. At evening's close, all are invited to join the procession and gather for shared tea and ambient sounds in the Afterlife Tent.
In an era defined by disconnection and cultural upheaval, The Cortège offers a rare space for solace, celebration, and renewal. Amid a rapidly expiring culture and scarcity of shared meaning, The Cortège serves as a container for collective and individual grief. Via ceremonious procession, The Cortège mourns the fate of the modern era, invites a reckoning with the New Gods of Perplexity, and shepherds souls toward what lies beyond the veil.
During the performance, a wordless, cinematic score is transmitted via wireless headsets, serving to bypass the analytical, cognitive brain and engage directly with the limbic system, the brain’s emotional and memory center. The soundscape features original music by El Búho, Boreta, and TOKiMONSTA, alongside tracks from Air, Andrew Bird, Beautiful Chorus, Freedom Fighters, Jean-Michelle Jarre, and others, supporting a richly layered sonic odyssey.
Inspired in part by Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, The Cortège speaks through archetypal symbol, sound, and movement rather than narrative dialogue. By embodying archetypes instead of characters, and ceremony instead of spectacle, The Cortège offers participants a space to witness, feel, and begin to process what cannot always be named.
Drawing on ancient rites, civic parades, and the avant-garde experiments of 20th-century performance, The Cortège revives these traditions for a contemporary audience through an alchemical synthesis of elements supported by a constellation of artists across disciplines.
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