mythsinger

Performative Mythology is focused on apprehending and performing the unspeakable and implicate contents of mythic experience. Only the myth performed can truly "inform" us. As the Oglala Holy Man Black Elk said, one cannot use the power of their vision "until it is performed on earth for the people to see." That is, one is not fully informed by the mythic vision, or the vision is not complete, until it is enacted. Hence the "informance of performance" inheres in an indivisible simultaneity of poesis and myth (mythopoesis).
Because the performative approach lends as much credence to the neurological as to metaphysical, to the somatic as to the psychic, the phenomena under consideration can be said to be biomythic.

Myth speaks the unspeakable, it is born of liminality and is entirely liminal (betwixt-and-between, neither here nor there, neither this nor that). Myth seeks to dissolve the status quo of conceptual consciousness by deforming ordinary realities and leaping through the breach [epistrophé] to the renewal of the undifferentiated and primordial; and this biomythic leap occurs within the performer as well as in the world.
Performative Mythology takes the above "deforming capacity" [Bachelard] as the mythic core of creativity—i.e., ritual and the expressive arts.

Deardorff is a "Singer" in the old sense of that word, which involves being a musician, a storyteller, and a maker of ritual. He has been a composer and a performing artist for more than three decades.

As an independent scholar of myth Deardorff's emphasis is on mythopoesis [myth-making] and the performative aspects of mythic expression. He is the author of The Other Within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture, & Psyche on White Cloud Press.

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