Yogananda
Durational performance, film documentation
(12 minutes 11 seconds)
2016
"The events of December 14, 2012 have been the most impactful of my entire life. The surreality of simultaneous life and death, love and hatred was overwhelming, and yet transcendent. Being so personally connected to this tragedy, and being in such an expressional stasis as a result, forced me to make sense of it in the only way I have ever known, which is through making.
Yogananda takes its origin from both the Indian guru Paramahansa Yogananda as well as the name of the street where myself and the perpetrator of the deadliest school shooting in US history grew up. For this exercise, I created a perimeter within which were 28 school chairs, representing the 26 victims from Sandy Hook Elementary, and two additional chairs representing the unaccounted victims, both living and non. Envisioning this as a space of sanctity and mourning, I did not step foot inside the “classroom,” however it was necessary for me to remove every chair from this metaphysical enclosure of violence. This was achieved by using my body as a projectile, puncturing the threshold and forcing the chairs to shatter and splay themselves outside of the perimeter. Through this structure, the intention was an objective-based, sadomasochistic catharsis in coping with my neighbor and classmate killing 26 children and teachers in what was my first grade classroom. What transpired was a reflection on the forces of karma, desire, and sacrifice. I simultaneously embodied the perpetrator, the victim, the reactionary savior, and the voyeur. Paralysis fused with rage, emptiness with overwhelming, grace with agony.
Paramahansa Yogananda passed away March 7th, 1952. As stated by the mortician, three weeks after his passing:
… [Yogananda] showed no signs of physical deterioration and ‘his unchanged face shone with the divine luster of incorruptibility’… This state of perfect preservation of a body is, so far as we know from mortuary annals, an unparalleled one.... Yogananda's body was apparently in a phenomenal state of immutability.... No odor of decay emanated from his body at any time.... For these reasons we state again that the case of Paramahansa Yogananda is unique in our experience.
(Rowe)
In reflecting on Yogananda, I could never answer how and why such evil could have been generated in a location named after this holy man. An understanding for the paradoxical nature of this convergence escaped me. It was only after gaining a deeper understanding of Yogananda’s teachings that I was afforded a semblance of acceptance, if not understanding. And it was through this acceptance that I was able to gain clarity in my intention and carry out this performance in honor of those who lost their lives on December 14th, 2012."
Millman, Dan; Childers, Doug (November 4, 2000). Divine Interventions: True Stories of Mysteries and Miracles That Change Lives. Rodale. ISBN 978-1-57954-338-9.