12 Shouts to the Ten Forgotten Heavens was 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 Museum of American Art, 12 Shouts began on the Vernal Equinox, March 2016, and unfolded on each solstice and equinox, with many beginnings and only one end, on the Winter Solstice, December 2018. It was offered as a celebration of the place-based sensitivity of the museum architecture and its awareness, interaction, and openness to the cycles and rhythms of the day, seasons, geographical location, and of human presence and interaction.

The 12 Shouts project as a whole represents a submission to a ritual cycle – an alignment with the breathing process of the Earth, as Rudolph Steiner would have it. This pamphlet is an experiential record of the flotsam and jetsam that washed up on the shore from the making of that project.

This pamphlet is part of UDP’s 2020 Pamphlet Series: twenty commissioned essays on collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing. The pamphlets are available for individual purchase and as a subscription. Each offers a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present, an engagement at once sustained and ephemeral.