12 Shouts to the Ten Forgotten Heavens is a three-year performance immersion project by playwright, director, and performer Sibyl Kempson and her company, 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf Co. Presented at the Whitney on each solstice and equinox between March 2016 and December 2018, the 12 Shouts are anarchic, mischievous rituals excavating history, mythology, art history, metaphysics, and ritual to create a new ceremonial calendar and contemporary mythology. Wicked, wiccan, wacky, awake, the 12 Shouts attend to the specific cycles of days and seasons and to the Whitney's particular architecture, location, and history. As with ritual (which gathers transitory and ephemeral human expression and wisdom), each performance reaffirmed a temporal and mythic order of deeper significance, moving from a stochastic state of complexity and fragmentation to the deep structural essences of cosmological unity. This volume collects the texts of all three summer solstices with introductions and astrological charts by Omie Johnson and extensive photo-documentation by Paula Court.

Photographer(s): Paula Court