ASCEND ASCEND

An immersive ritual performance

2019-2023

Medium: Poetry, performance, installation, sound, scent, and ritual
Duration: Approximately 60 minutes
Role: Creator, artistic director, producer, and performer
Production partner: Atlas Obscura

Ascend Ascend began as a book-length poem written over twenty days in the tower of a century-old church, while I worked in and out of trance through meditation, fasting, chanting, and ritual. When Third Man Books published the poem in 2019, a conventional bookstore reading felt inadequate to the conditions from which the work had emerged. I wanted the audience not simply to hear the poem, but to enter the space that had produced it.

I conceived Ascend Ascend as a full-length, site-responsive performance. I recited the poem in its entirety from within a sigil-inscribed circle bordered by earth, live marigolds, handmade beeswax candles, incense, and ritual objects. Light, scent, sound, breath, silence, and duration became part of the composition. The aim was not to illustrate the poem, but to make its interior architecture temporarily inhabitable.

Produced in partnership with Atlas Obscura, the work toured seven American cities in 2019 and returned for a second series of performances in 2023. Each staging was shaped in response to the architecture and acoustics of an unusual civic or sacred space. Musical collaborators included film composer Mark Korven (The Witch, The Lighthouse); cellist and composer Lori Goldston (Nirvana, Earth); bassist and vocalist Dylan Desmond (Bell Witch); and producer Randall Dunn (Sunn O))), Earth, Wolves in the Throne Room). Some performances incorporated a composed score; others unfolded through live improvisation.

My role extended beyond writing and performing the text. I composed the encounter as a whole: its ritual architecture, visual and material language, sequence, pace, emotional arc, collaborators, and relationship between performer, site, and audience. The structure was precise, but never closed. Musicians entered with a shared intention rather than a fixed script, allowing each performance to change in response to the room, its acoustics, and the gathered audience.

The audience was not asked to participate overtly, but their attention completed the work. Through sustained presence, silence, and collective surrender, each room became what I came to think of as a palace in time: a temporary space in which private mystical experience could become public without becoming explanation or spectacle.

CREDITS

Created, directed, produced, and performed by: Janaka Stucky
Produced in partnership with: Atlas Obscura
Based on: Ascend Ascend, published by Third Man Books
Photography: Adrianne Mathiowetz, Pooneh Gana
Selected musical collaborators: Mark Korven (The Witch, The Lighthouse); Lori Goldston (Nirvana, Earth); Dylan Desmond (Bell Witch); Randall Dunn (Sunn O))), Earth, Wolves in the Throne Room); and Adam Beckley (Adam Glasseye, The Insect Fable).
Live album: Ascend Ascend: Live in Seattle with Lori Goldston, released by Neurot Recordings, 2023

Selected Conversations and Press

The Creative Independent
“On Using Ritual to Guide Your Work”

BOMB Magazine
“Radical Worship”

Talkhouse
“Dylan Desmond and Janaka Stucky Are Going Off Script”

VICE
“Janaka Stucky Brings a Doom-Metal Mysticism to His Poetry Readings”

Tupelo Quarterly
“The Poem Becomes the Vessel for Mystical Experience”

Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“Occult Influences and Trance States: Janaka Stucky’s Singular Poetry”