The first coding of the hard reality about them into sounds or symbols would have offered powers of communication to the user as unearthly and unprecedented as telepathy might seem to us. The first to capture some innate truth of the human world within the lines of dance or drawing would propel their audience towards a different plane of understanding and perception more extreme than the effects of any drug. The drawings on the cave walls of Lascaux, apart from any ritual significance that they may otherwise have had, are in themselves a magic act: to those without the previous concept of a manufactured image, it would seem as if the prancing beasts were conjured into flesh and manifest within the cave itself. The roots of Art and all abstraction are in Magic, firelight, and the hidden world.

If this seems an extreme interpretation of our first response to Art, consider a more latterly example: when Winsor McCay, an artist credited with the invention of the animated film, first premiered his prototype cartoon Gertie the Dinosaur in 1914, the reaction of theatre audiences was instructive. Lacking the perceptual apparatus necessary to take in the notion of a cartoon animal, most of the audience instead believed that they had witnessed a real, flesh and blood dinosaur upon the stage before them. Even though the beast moved through a landscape that included lake and mountains, where the viewers must have surely known existed only the theatre's real wall, they were evidently so disoriented by the stark immediacy of this unfamiliar artform that they somehow rearranged their own perceptions as to paper over the discrepancies.

If this was the reaction not a century ago, then how much more severe was the response of our most distant ancestor to the unprecedented new technologies of art and language? At a certain early point in their development, the artist and the shaman are made indivisible, both drawing something down from out the unseen world of concept or idea and into form. All art and all human creative impulse then, must have their earliest steps within the realm of Magic, being first perceived as such. The Arts and Magic, known traditionally as 'the Art', have in common their attempt at the manipulation of a kind of meta-space; an immaterial realm of thought and inspiration. If the earliest roots of Art may therefore be described as magical, it follows that in order to be genuinely radical within the arts, an effort must be made to first locate and understand those roots.

With this in mind, and in collaboration with musicians Dave J and Tim Perkins, I've attempted to construct a process and a context for performance art and poetry that builds on and makes use of the shamanic worldview to direct the audience through a structured mental landscape to a predetermined level of awareness. Each performance that emerges from this process is considered a unique event to be performed on one occasion only, at a specified location that is felt to be appropriate to the intention of the work, on a specific date considered to be equally significant.

This is intended to intensify the sense of ritual and aura of occasion necessary to involve the audience within the glamour of the work, but also serves to instantly remove the whole experience from the artificially-created regimen of write, publish and tour that is associated with most areas of performance, from pop music through to poetry. The energy of the performance here is undiluted by all subsequent or previous repetitions, standing as a singular event with its initial force intact.

The subject matter of the work and means of execution are likewise derived from ritual; attempts at a more active interaction with the world of concept and idea where forces conjured, though perceived as utterly imaginary, in the context of conceptual space are treated as though real. In practice, this approach has proven to be speedy and efficient, yielding two extensive, complex works from two intensive two-week periods.

After the first, overtly occult work which was performed at the Bridewell Theatre just off Fleet Street in July of 1994, a more tightly focused application of the principle seemed necessary. Newcastle offered an opportunity to hone the process to a finer edge, in a controlled environment.

The resultant work, titled The Birth Caul and arrived at by the processes described above, was an attempt to draw the audience along the spiral of a winding, umbilical text, into successive pre-pubertal, pre-verbal and finally pre-natal states of being. A continuous emotive landscape was provided musically, through which a path of narrative was drawn, the whole affair successfully performed within the atmospheric confines of Newcastle's nineteenth century Old County Court, built over the remains of Hadrian's Wall. Judged in creative terms, arranging this unique event called into being work that could not otherwise have come about. It is upon this principle of something out of nothing that all our creative processes, all art and sorcery, are founded.

Alan Moore