by kSea flux & Isa Shisha

kSea: Hello! This is kSea with Hjeron of Mythmaker - tell me about the origins of Mythmaker – how it came about, and what was the inspiration for it?

Hjeron: I'm the originator, the visionary, the sparker. There's been tons of help along the way, tons of people putting in lots of time and energy, but it's always been a vision coming through me. I've always been interested in really different stuff – esotericism, ghosts, nature – since I was a little kid.I started back in Ontario, training in a Wiccan coven for a while. I was fully initiated, went through all the learnings of Celtic mythology, Celtic history,and a lot of different ceremonies. I was really surprised at how theatrical the ceremonies were.

In high school I was really big on theater and really big on music, so I learned a lot of the storytelling aspects, the theater aspects – basically, Celtic magic and Celtic philosophy really merging theater, ritual and story into the same sacred ceremony, so there was never really a big line between ceremony and theater for me, which is really where the roots of theater came from in the first place. I've never gone to theater school, I've never studied anything formal in putting together any type of show, which has really, at times, annoyed and pissed off certain actors and choreographers. You know, 'I went to acting school for 6 years! Why are you the director?' I reply, 'I don't know. Because I know how to make a story happen?' So that's one thing I'm really thankful for. I basically skipped a couple of centuries of what theater has become. I go to see theater, and most of it's just boring. 'Oh my God, can I get up and leave now?' I forget that theater can be, and mostly is, that boring. I get there and wonder, 'Oh my God, what are these people doing?'

kSea: When things follow a formulated pattern that has been taught to them, then it loses its soul. It loses its spirit.

Hjeron: 'Man, these guys have a crazy budget, and it's boring. I'm no budget, and we're like pizow!' A lot of it is about where it comes from. It comes from that ceremonial traditional roots and skips over what traditional theater is. I basically went from studying deep magicks in Celtic European culture to studying a lot of Native American & South American stuff, and getting really involved in Celtic magick and Native American spirituality. All of these traditions had a really strong lineage of storytelling, & storytelling was how they taught their magick. Storytelling was how they taught their culture to stay in an impeccable space, to stay in a good healthy space with their relationship with each other and to nature. I was really pulled by that and really saw how our culture is missing that. It has really lost that. Our storytelling has been bastardized by movies and Top 40 music. I'm into Terrence McKenna and a lot of McKenna's work, and one of the most potent quotes I've heard Terrence McKenna say was that the job of shifting culture, the job of leading culture into the future has always been the job of the artists. It's been the painters, the musicians, the theatrical aspects. All these things have been what leads culture to a new level of spirituality, of spirit coming through. Our culture has been turned into consumerism, and consumerism has taken over that art form. Really, the artists need to stand back up and reclaim it, and do what their job is, which is more than just entertaining on the street corner. It's to actually lead inspiration into new realms.

Isa: At what point did you decide you want to put this into production, to step it up?

Hjeron: This was back in Ontario, and I went through a lot of different visionary experiences, really potent experiences where I really just had visions to do this – literally, full-on crazy, opening spiritual experiences that were teaching me how to be and were teaching me these stories. One of them told me really clearly, 'You need to go do this.You need to get these stories out to the people to transform culture. That's what it's for. That's what your job is. You're not the only one who does that. You're don't need to be big on yourself, but you are one of the people that is supposed to come here and form something to help shift this out of the crap that it's in. You need to go west. You need to go west of British Columbia, the deep mountains. Go to the sea, go to the mountains where nature is really raw.' I was in the east where there were grids of cities and all this was happening – little pieces of nature with big concrete cities. I'm having huge awakenings, so, 'Go west, go west.' At the time, I was in a four-piece heavy rock band. That's what I thought the medium was supposed to be. The other band members thought, 'Woah, he's definitely kind of weird and out there and a little crazy, but – man, he writes really cool shit and he's got some wicked ideas, so we'll tolerate him.' That facet of consciousness out east was unheard-of.

I couldn't fit what I was looking for, and what had to come through into a four-piece rock band. It was too out of the box from that. That's when I moved out west. The singer of our band backed out at the last minute so our band fell apart, but we still all came. We had a big tour bus. When I came out west, that's when theater came back in. I went back to the roots of theater. I thought, 'This is the medium.' That's the perfection, the amazing aspect of theater – It fits everything. You can play music, you can have a story, you can have poetry, you can have dancing, you can have visual art. Any art form.

kSea: You can incorporate the audience and do anything you possibly can imagine.

Hjeron: Exactly, exactly. Any art form known to man can be woven into theater. It's a beautiful template – especially if you break the boundaries of what traditional theater is – it's a perfect template for any art form to fit in, so that's where I found my palette.

kSea: But really, what is traditional theater? Go back far enough, and traditional theater is exactly what you're doing, which is storytelling.

Hjeron: Ancient-traditional theater is totally that. That's where I found my palette. That's what I view all the art forms as – paints on a palette. In everything that Mythmaker does, in everything that we do, story is what's key. We're storytellers. All the circus, all the fire, all the music – everything else, all that, is just colors of paint to paint the story. That's where we differ from a lot of other circus troupes. Cirque du Soleil is amazing, totally phenomenal, but really their focus is the extreme artistic place that the human being can push their body, which is beautiful.

They're phenomenal in what they do, but that's what they do, and that's not what we do. I would rather have an aerialist that's releasing a quarter of their talent in a really meaningful, intentional way that weaves into the story that they are the character. They are the moth, or they are the spider. Maybe they're not doing these crazy 5th-level contortionist thing – because it has no relevance. Instead, they're doing the movements of a spider on the silks, on the aerials. That's my priority. How is it weaving the story? How is it all coming together to be one thing, not a whole bunch of little things. That's where it's the palette of the art. Everything's that done is done for a reason within a story. With things like Cirque du Soleil, it always surprised me. You've got an audience of thousands of people. Their eyes are wide open, their mouths are dropped, gawking at what's going on – and you're not giving them anything. You're just giving them the gawk. If they're there, eyes dropped and mouths open, give them something. BOOM! Here's a story. BOOM! Here's a symbol and an archetype. So that people don't just go away thinking, 'Wow, that was really wild,' but they go away thinking. They go away processing. They go away alchemizing.

kSea: At the same time, I think we all owe Cirque du Soleil a debt of gratitude because they brought the new circus back into a realm where people had forgotten about it.

Hjeron: Totally.

kSea: They'd forgotten about the artistry people have, all the talent. I think that a lot of what they do is perhaps toning it down so that it doesn't shock people.

Hjeron: Yeah. Totally. Hats off to Cirque du Soleil, especially being fellow Canadians. They did it. They're super-inspirational. They were a bunch of jugglers and card trickers out at a coffee shop. They just got up and did it. They paved the way to show that it can be done. I definitely honor what they're doing. What they're doing is different than what we're doing in that way.

kSea: Which is where art comes in. If everyone was doing the same thing, there wouldn't be a point in doing it.

Isa: What year was it that Mythmaker was actually conceived?

Hjeron: What year was it? I don't know. I've been saying lately that Mythmaker has been happening as its form of theater for about 7 years now. That's kind of a guess. I'm really bad at time lines. The only accurate time line that I really have is the age of my kids. That's about it. Once they came along, then things actually had a little bit more of solid time line. Now I think, 'Oh, that was when he was 3.' About 7 years. It came out of orchestrating large public ceremony, so after studying Wicca and Celtic magic out east, I came out west to look for a teacher. I heard there were more Pagans out west. 'You can't spit without hitting a Pagan' kind of thing. I thought, 'Cool! That's the place for me to go!'

Then I got out here – well, Vancouver area – and I thought, 'Yeah, everyone's into earth magic. Everyone's into being with the earth, and no one knows what the hell they're doing.' They're all just a bunch of kids drumming around a fire and doing whatever. Yeah, they're camping and living with the earth, which is beautiful, but nobody one knows how to harness energy. No one's initiated in anything. You don't have to be initiated in anything, but you'd have to know how to use the energies you're playing with. Yeah, there's 30 people drumming on the full moon, but then they just walk away. I thought, 'Hey guys, come here. We can do stuff with this.'

It was funny, coming out looking for a teacher. The land was the teacher. The actual earth itself was the teacher. When I called my teacher back east, I said, 'Hey, this is all going on. People are looking for me to teach.' She said, 'I knew that would happen. I know that that's who you are and what you did. Do it. You don't need my permission, but my permission is there. You've got it – give it to them.' I started orchestrating giant ceremonial circles on the full moons and tribal solstices, going to Rainbow gatherings and tribal gatherings, pulling together large community gatherings on the high holidays. It went from 60 people in a circle at a Rainbow gathering to – in Winslow, where I live – one year we did a 500-person Burning Man ceremony. I orchestrated the entire ceremony with a 35-foot high Burning Man. We had fire dancers in the south and different performance artists in each direction doing full performance art in each direction, bringing the new Lord and Lady of the Sun in as two little kids on big platforms with big muscle guys and drummers coming in. We orchestrated the whole thing. They lit the big Burning Man. It was really interesting because that was one of the peak ceremonies we did before I actually considered it theater. At that, we needed to clear the entire space and have everyone come in through the gateways to be saged and smudged. I had this really interesting voice. I don't know what it is about it, but in those times I realized – well, I'd do experiments with it. We'd be in a crowd of 200 people, and some guy would yell, 'Hey guys, can we focus here? Hey guys!' He was 2 foot taller than me, and just as loud of a voice, but then I'd turn and yell, 'Hey! Can we all –' and the crowd would turn around. I'd test it. 'Okay, that guy tried 6 times. Watch, I'm going to try it once.' The whole crowd would look. I don't know if it's the tone or what, but it's a really wacky thing. I thought, 'Wow, neat.'

So I got 500 people to leave the space, to leave the field, and come back in through the door to get saged and smudged. A buddy of mine said, 'Dude, I don't know anybody who can get 500 people at a party to get the fuck out of the party, only so they can come back into the party. You're fucking crazy.' In that, the last person was in the corner of the field with his tent, and I came up to him. 'Yeah, we're all going out to come back in to do this ceremony.' He looked at me and said, 'I didn't come here for this.' I said, 'Well, that's what we're doing. That's what this is.' He was really uncomfortable. He said, 'I didn't come here for this. This isn't what I wanted.' I replied, 'Well, this is what we're doing. You need to do it. That's what this event is about. It's really safe. It's really gentle. There's no mal-intent here. It's all beautiful, bringing community together. You can either go and not be a part of it, or be a part of it with everybody. This is what we're doing, and you need to get with the program.' He was gruff, and walked out. I don't know if he stayed or didn't stay, but it really affected me. The look of fear and uncomfortability, that [due to] whatever cultural programming he had, this ceremony thing was scary for him. Everybody came back in. It was one of the peak nights of our whole summer solstice events.

It was totally phenomenal and amazing, totally beautiful, but afterwards it really hit me. I'm doing this for all the tribal-pagan-earth-goddess-mama-lover people. They love it. They're great, but they already got it, to a certain extent. These people already know what's going on and the love that it's happening on this grander level, but what about that guy? That's the guy that needs to clue in. That's the guy that needs to figure it out. That's the guy that needs to have a taste of his own roots. That's when it flipped the coin from ceremony to theater. The next piece we did was actually a theater piece, and I realized that with the tag 'theater' we get more theatrical, we get more story, we get more dynamic with that, but all the ceremony is still there. All the energy is still there. As soon as it's in the realm of theater, Aunt Jenny and little Bobby – 'Look at that guy with the horns and the swords, Bobby! Isn't he neat onstage? They're doing theater.' Yeah, we are doing theater. We're doing old theater, the way it was done. All of the sudden, not calling it a ritual but calling it theater, we can do all the same stuff and more, and everybody loved it. The people that got it, got it – and the people that didn't get it, got a little bit of it.

kSea: Do you have any specific experiences with someone who had no idea what was going on? The little boy or aunt coming up to you afterwards saying that it affected them in a special way?

Hjeron: Oh yeah, totally. Countless. It amazes me. As a director, I get offstage and think, 'Oh my God, this didn't go off. That didn't go off.' I'm beating myself up – and this is a process that I've learned to get off, is my perfectionism with everything, especially dealing with low budgets and amateurs and everything else. It's been a huge curve of training myself to walk up that ladder, but – yeah, I'll be grumbling about how horrible the performance went and people would come with wide eyes and dropped jaws. 'Oh my God, that was the most amazing thing I've ever seen! This meant that for me, mean this for me, and that for me.' The symbolisms and the things that people bring out – a lot of times it is what was intended, and a lot of time it's personal symbolism.

When we did The Birth of the Storyteller piece, there were these two black, crazy spiders with elk ribs for fangs that came out. It was about facing the fear of nature and then embracing it. Afterwards, this guy came up to me and said, 'That meant so much to me. That shifted so much in my world. That was such a portal for my experience – and when those two squirrels came out and they surrounded you like that, that just hit home.' I'm looking at him like, 'The squirrels? [kSea laughs] He fucking thinks the spiders were squirrels!' I replied, 'Cool, yeah. Exactly.' Whatever you needed to get out of it, you got it.

Isa: Were the masks always an integral part of it or did it work up to that later?

Hjeron: Going from the ceremony to the theater, the first piece that I did, I thought, 'Okay, dude, you've just got to do something you can do. You've got to bite the bullet, go as basic as you can, and get it done.' So I went and studied two traditional Native American fire myths and wove them together into one story, as the first and second part of a story. Then I got all the fire spinners I knew and did Journey to the Flame, which was the first theater piece Mythmaker ever did. It was all animal costumes. Everyone was a different animal, and then there was the human. It was the animals' gift of flame to the human, and where fire came from in the first place. It was totally beautiful. I narrated, as a storyteller. That was the first theater piece that the storyteller spoke in… wait - what was the question?

kSea: [laughs] The masks, costuming.

Hjeron: Oh yeah, the masks! A buddy of mine, Andy, had studied fabrication and fiber arts. He said, 'Here's this mask-making style of paper mache masks.' My partner and co-founder of Mythmaker, Rebecca, who is also the mother of my children, entered as the theatrical aspects of Mythmaker happened. A lot of the spiritual aspects were me on my solo quests, then we became partners. She is an amazing visual artist, and amazing sculptress. Then she came in with these mask techniques. We were all impressed, so we made a bear mask and an owl mask and a wolf mask. She just went off with it – she was a clay sculptor. She went to Emily Carr, which is a high level school in Vancouver, for painting and sculpting. The basis of those masks is that you sculpt clay on a mold of your face, then you put papier-mache on the clay and smash the clay out, so it makes it really light. Whatever you can sculpt in clay can be a mask. Her being a master sculptress, all of a sudden you get stuff like the earth mother. Those horns are papier mache. That whole mask is papier mache. She sculpts these giant creature character things, like this dragon. She makes all of those masks. I made the sun mask, but that dragon head was all clay. It was so freaking heavy. It's epic. Andy gave us the skills of mask making, and then she took it to a whole other level with her sculpting and got into giant puppets. That's where we had the giant dragon puppets and the giant troll puppets. I would dream up the creatures, and she'd make them. She'd say, 'Wow, awesome.'

That's the one art I don't excel at. I'm something of a jack of all trades, from poetry to music to sound design to swords to costumes and all this, but drawing and painting? My seven year old son draws betters than I do. I draw stick people. I've always been in awe of visual artists, too, because that's a skill that I don't hold. She is a world class, phenomenal painter. Her paintings should be up there with Alex Gray. She's the feminine visionary of that masculine genre. A lot of her art just hasn't gotten out there yet, a lot of which is because she spent the last 7 years focusing on Mythmaker. She got sick of touring, understandably so. We toured for the last 2 years, with both of my kids. The last 2 years on the bus on tour, my 4 year old daughter and 7 year old son, who were 2 and 5 when we started. It was amazing. We thought it would be a nightmare, and it was angelic. They kept a grounding cord to everything. They loved it. They flowered.

We spent so much time looking for community, looking for this piece of land with intentional community of people really looking out for each other. For years we'd wanted that, and still wanting that, then all of a sudden last year we were on the bus with 10 people and 2 kids. I looked at her and said, 'We have that community, right here, on a bus. Look, Joel's designing a board game. My 6 year old son is co-designing a board game with him while the belly dancer is teaching my 3 year old daughter how to dance.' Everybody loves the kids, and they're a part of it all. My son, last year – I really saw him go through a huge transformation. I always wondered, 'Is it good for the kids? Is it too uprooted? Is it really the best for them?' I think it is, but I was always checking myself, being perceptive of what's going on.

The school he was in last year he had such a hard time in. It was really loose and unfocused, an alternative school, and he really got snarly and angry. The older kids were really picky. I saw him really introvert. Then we went on tour, and I saw him come out of his shell and be this empowered, potent kid that he is. I thought, 'Dude, you're 7 years old and you show up on a circus bus at the festivals.'

kSea: One thing you mentioned before we started recording is about when you brought The Birth of the Storyteller to the fairies, which was quite amusing – mind telling that again?

Hjeron: Sure! I won't name the festival, because they're really good people and I really like them. We were booked for a tour a couple of years ago. We were booked at a kind of new age festival that was really light and fluffy in the things that they do, and we showed up in our bus. We showed up in the 40-foot green horned bus and all these dark leather and feathers and super-crazy outfits, which are our normal clothes. Time and time again, we get off the bus and people are just gawking, 'Wow, nice costumes.' We say, 'These are our clothes. You should see when we put our costumes on. This is me waking up in my stuff.' We get off the bus and this one older lady looks up at the lead dancer at the time, looks at her and says, 'You're not a fairy, are you?' She looks down at the lady and says, 'No, I'm not.' The lady looks back up and says, 'You're more like a dark elf.' [everyone laughs] She replied, 'Yeah, yeah.' I consider us more wild elves, with an edge of dark.

Then we came to do our theater piece, and at the time the theater piece was The Birth of the Storyteller, which encompasses the shamanic principles of death and rebirth and facing fears and facing fears of nature. The soundtrack was very intimidating with post-industrial clicking, spidery machine sounds and stuff like that. We came up and did our performance, totally on par, full choreography between spiders and swords and all these different things – death and rebirth, facing the shadow and then being reborn as a storyteller – and these big epic, white stilted beings giving gifts, and then it ends and it's silent. You literally could hear a cricket chirp. Basically, we scared the shit out of them. They were all drop-jawed and no one knew how to take it. Then the MC got up and said, 'Okay, that was different.' Then one of the shamanic practitioners that was doing a workshop there came up to us afterwards and said, 'You know what? You were exactly what this festival needed. You were exactly what these people needed. They ordered the medicine, they just didn't know what the hell it was going to look like. They're so into the light shining angelic perceptual aspect that the dark and the aspect of dark not being wrong or not being evil is something that they've needed and they've been pushing out of their perceptual field. You guys brought it to them, right in the heart of their festival, and they just didn't know how to take it because that's not the realm that they're used to.'

Mythmaker was given/channeled/opened/realized/created/whatever, however it came in and through – its intention is a cultural transforming device, and that's what it is, what the being, what the entity of Mythmaker is. It's here to alchemize. It's here to shift the way people think about themselves, about nature, about their ancestors, about the whole thing. A lot of that in my personal mission, and it feels like what Mythmaker's mission is, is to speak up for the dark. That's one of my big things. Especially in new age's new perceptual concept of light. 'It's all light, let the light be with you.' Light can be imbalanced. Light can be really twisted. If you've got this perceptual horse shield on of 'light is all good and dark is all bad,' there's a lot slipping under the radar. I really avoid the terms of 'good' and 'evil.'

kSea: I don't think they exist. I think they are just ideas that humans have created in order to judge people, so they can say in all their imagined righteousness “I’m good because I believe in this, and you’re bad because you don’t.”

Hjeron: Totally. That was one of my first lessons in ancient Celtic shamanism Wicca class. She sat me down. 'First thing you're going to do is take 'good' and 'evil' out of your vocabulary because it's a human concept. There's no such thing. There's no good and evil in nature. It's a human perceptual thing. It's an excuse for action. What there is, is balance and imbalance.' Perfect balance is stagnation and extreme imbalance is way off the charts. That's what I really felt with light and dark. There can be balance and imbalanced light, and there can be balanced or imbalanced dark. Too much of our two-dimensional perception in our culture is that light is good, dark is evil. Dark is the womb of the mother, the deep beautiful night around a campfire. It gets into whole other perceptions of white magic and black magic. The ancient traditional black magic wasn't evil magic. White magic was external magic and black or dark magic was internal magic. Cultural aspects trying to control mass populations made internal, dark magic punishable by death because you're empowering yourself from within. That's a lot of what Mythmaker is here to do. We really delve and play and bring through archetypes that are the underdog. We've got a full coyote pelt outfit. The coyote's been with us since the beginning. I've met white people in Native American traditions that are theatrical people that have left Mythmaker because we dance with the coyote. She freaked out. She saw the coyote pelt, she saw the whole thing and said, “I've worked with [unintelligible] for 2 and a half years, and I can't be here if you're working with that medicine.” I said, 'Obviously you haven't worked deep enough with that medicine then, because I play with the coyote, and yeah, the coyote plays with me, and it's beautiful because I'm a really solid, stable guy with a solid, stable ego. So it's great that the coyote's on my back to kick me in the ass and remind me to laugh at myself, because if not I can take myself way too seriously.'

In almost every one of my pieces we bring in the Coyote in so many different aspects, and let them shine. Take the evil out of them, take that perceptual aspect out of them. In our protagonist-antagonist good guy/bad guy sort of way, we're always showing the role of the bad guy and what it is. It's not evil, it's not dark. It's not twisted. It's actually just either imbalanced or balanced, because the light is imbalanced. So, dealing with things like owl medicine and coyote medicine, and things that people are more afraid of, we want to bring it out and let its story come through because they're all allies. They're all tools - all these archetypes, all these nature animals. Whether it's a psychological symbolic aspect of humanity or a deep magical actual semi-physical thing is irrelevant. The fact is, these symbols work on human consciousness. We can all utilize them to start waking up and empowering ourselves in a more clear way. A lot of it, too, is Celtic culture. That was one of my big pulls through Wicca and Celtic study and story, is that I really feel that one of the reasons Western culture is so messed up is because we're afraid of our roots. We've been told that our roots are evil, wrong, twisted, and not to look in that closet, but that's our ancestry. That's where Western Europeans are from. That's where Mythmaker is bringing these stories, these ancient Celtic stories, out of the closet. 'Look over here! This was actually good stuff. This is where we came from.'

It's connections to nature. Our spiritual connection to nature was severed and there was nothing wrong with it. It was actually really beautiful and peaceful and amazing. To look back at that and think, 'Hey, look, our people had a connection to nature, had a spiritual connection to nature. It wasn't this solar deity that's really harsh and judging. That's desert, that's desert people.' That's all nature religions. It's all rooted in nature religions. You've got a harsh, judging solar deity – which, that's the way it was in the desert – if you didn't follow the rules of the sun in the desert, you would die.

It was harsh, jealous, judgmental, everything, and religions from that area had that symbol and the mother was non-existent because the earth was a desert, but that template doesn't fit on a people where the ocean and the earth is super lush and plentiful and giving. The sun is revered. In Europe, it's rainy and wet and misty. When the sun came out and the solar deity came out, it was like, 'Thank you!' It was this gentle, fertile, thankful thing, so bringing that back to people in as subtle a way as needed is really one of the keys to, I feel, helping shift culture. I think people really connect to their own ancestral roots. A lot of native teachers that I've worked with say, 'Go find your thing. Where'd your people come from? What are you doing here?' People in those traditions are a lot more receptive when you come and say, 'Yeah, these are the aspects of my people and where we came from and how we connected to the land that our DNA came from. I'd also like to learn about this land, and about how your people do that magic and do those things, because there are pieces missing in our puzzle.' I'm not coming to see a whole new movement, I'm just coming because mine's got holes in it where, as your people were wiped out by white people, my people were wiped out too. It's not that different, it's only hundreds of years and our skin tone was the same color. We're in a similar scene, here. That's a part of what we're working for, to educate and empower. I'm fairly obsessed.

Isa: What workshops do you have going on? What are they? What do they entail? What's involved with them?

Hjeron: We teach everything we do. That's another thing with Mythmaker. We're not about the rock star 'We're up on the stage, you're doing on the audience. You could never be like me, you could never be like me.' The stage is weird, that there's a line. For me, the only reason there's a line is so that it can be higher for people to see. That line is dissolved and the hand comes down from the stage to say, 'Come on up. Come on up here. Anybody that wants to, anybody that feels driven, we'll bring you up here.' That's what we do at almost every festival we go to. We suck people in to our performances. There's so many open roles. 'Here. Here's a mask and a cloak and whatever, and run around like this with a sword with your other four buddies.' All of a sudden, they're in a theater piece, onstage. People say, 'Oh my God, I never thought I'd do that.' Yeah, you didn't think you'd do that at 2 o'clock this afternoon, and it's 6 o'clock in the evening and you're onstage.

kSea: And then the next day they see an entirely different world in front of them.

Hjeron: Oh yeah. Totally, totally. We teach everything we do, from stilt walking to fire spinning to mask making to leather work. Sacred theater – playback theater is another word for a certain genre of sacred theater that we teach that's really just expressive, interpersonal theater. Sacred ceremony, working with medicine wheels and archetypes and shamanic journeys of animal medicine totems. Whatever is called. A lot of times, if were at a festival and they want a workshop, I'll just say 'sacred theater.' Then I'll wing it. I don't have any books with notes or whatever. That's what we did at Burning Man. We had a sacred theater workshop. I showed up at 11. I was half awake, and thought, 'Okay, let's see who comes and what we want to do.' It was hugely transformative for people. It was hugely transformative for people. It's getting silly, breaking the box, having fun. That's somewhere I feel I'm really different and shocking for people, because it is ceremony, it is magical theater – and I get really silly and have a lot of fun. Let's break down the walls. Spirituality doesn't have to be this [growls]. No! We're here to play. For me, magic is about play. Magic is about play with reality in a good, impeccable, don't hurt anybody but do what you can do and do your thing. If you're doing your thing and you're not hurting anybody, do your thing.

kSea: There's no greater conveyor or builder of energy than play and laughter. It just gets way down deep inside of you and all of a sudden, the world is open and yet you see the world through entirely different eyes.

Hjeron: A lot of is just not being stuck on a form. For me, the biggest thing in Mythmaker has been for me to get out of the way. As much as I'm the 'director of Mythmaker,' the visionary – Really, the most magical things happen when I get the fuck out of the way. It's super difficult. It's super difficult when you've got a massive performance in front of 10,000 people in 4 days and you're just trusting because these things aren't actually together and you're trusting that, 'Okay, it's going to happen.' Through the years, it proves itself that it's going to happen, but it's taken a lot for me to get out of the role of thinking, 'It has to all be planned, it has to all be set, it has to all be choreographed,' to the point of when we did the Fairy Festival in Eugene, Oregon. It was phenomenal, totally amazing. We did it in a day. We had no idea what we were going to do. The guy that was supposed to run it got stopped at the Canadian border and they turned to me. I was supposed to help him, but he was the visionary of it. They turned to me and said, 'Hjeron, we need a midnight performance. Tomorrow.' I thought, 'Cool. That's what I do. I do it in the now.' It was beautiful. I went and found the most amazing performers at the festival. 'Hey, do you want to be in this tonight?' We got a rehearsal in 3 hours. I pulled out the machine creatures, the 4-legged silt creatures, goblin masks. We had 5 choreographed fire hula hoop spinners that went into 5 double staff spinners, to this whole story of the transformation of the business goblin and the dark elves and the light elves. I made the whole thing up. I had a basic outline in my head that morning. We did two run-throughs in which most of my dialogue was 'blah-blah-blah, blah-blah-blah-blah.' Literally. Everyone was looking at me. 'Does he have a script or something?' I'd say, 'So the goblins are over here, and then I'll say, 'The goblins are transformed by blah-blah-blah, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.' I'll say something, and then the elf will come in and heal the thing with the blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.' So the movement was there, but the dialog was totally unknown. We got the Wicker Men and Trillian Green [sp?], two of my favorite bands, to combine as one band for our live soundtrack. They were both stoked. They said, 'Oh my God, we've been wanting to play together for so long, we just haven't had the opportunity!' I just wove them together. 'Here you go, guys.' Silver flute, wicked guitar, wicked hand drums, a bunch of amazing instruments. Then I got up onstage in a storyteller outfit and fucking pulled it out of my ass and just made the shit up. It was pretty intimidating. I'm walking up onstage, thinking, 'I don't know what I'm going to say.'

kSea: That's when you lose your head and go into your heart and soul. That's when the most amazing stuff comes out.

Hjeron: Totally. It was so amazing. 'I have a cast of 30 people that were put together yesterday, and I have no idea what I'm going to say and I'm the storyteller that's weaving the story together.' I just got up there and I just did it. I look back on it and think, 'Holy shit.' There was one time – when I look back at it, I get such a laugh out of it – there was one time I kind of tripped up. The rest of it sounded like it was memorized and practiced for ages. 'And then the dark elves came from the dark to heal the dark of the darkness.' I listened back and thought, 'Ohhh.' We all laughed. 'Rewind that again! Yeah, you were on, buddy, you were on.' Other than that, it was totally smooth. I had no idea. It was totally intimidating.

kSea: I've found that when things like that happen, I have absolutely no idea what I said afterwards.

Hjeron: Totally. That's what it's like with me with music, music and story. I need to record it so I can go back and figure out what the hell I said.

kSea: One of the things, one of best examples I have, is when I was at my parents' 40th wedding anniversary. People were getting up and saying stuff. It was all kind of prescribed. I thought, 'I want to get up and say something. I have no idea what I'm going to say.' I've been always the black sheep of the family. Growing up in a Roman Catholic atmosphere with mid-western values, I just didn't seem to fit in – go figure. I got up there with one line that I wanted to start off with, and just started talking. I had no idea where it went. Finally, I realized I was done. I looked out at the audience, and almost everyone was crying. 'Uhh, thanks.'

Hjeron: Totally. It's the art of the storyteller. In a humble manner, I'm a storyteller. I can just do it.

kSea: It's not you, it comes through you.

Hjeron: Exactly. It's an ancient thing that you just tap into. It's all about the art of getting out of the way. I could have written something and stressed out about it and had all the lines there and had a piece of paper onstage. It would have been whatever, or I could just go up there and open my mouth and see what comes out. So far, it's worked.

Isa: You talk about ritual. Are there any rituals that you guys do to maintain your health and mentality when you're traveling and staying in a bus?

Hjeron: Oh, yeah. It's key. This aspect of this tour is really different, but generally talking and sharing circles every day is key. Sitting down with sage and singing bowl, opening it up, just asking how everyone's feeling, what's going on. What's up? Who's pissed off at who because they stepped on their corn flakes? What, most of the time petty or ridiculous, thing are you holding that after 4 days is going to be a vent and explosion. Just to let it out, and really working with communication techniques like with a group of people on a us, is key. Have people check in with where they're at. If you don't do it for a while, you feel it. You feel the pressure cooker build up until you did it, or until somebody pops.

kSea: That's really good advice for anyone who goes on tour.

Hjeron: There's one other thing. This is the Mythmaker comic book. (Hjeron pulls a comic book out of his bag)

kSea: No way!

Hjeron: This is the final sketch. It's being inked right now in Vancouver. Originally, this is the story that we're doing on the Earthdance stage. That is our story piece this year that I'm working on the soundtrack for right, now that's crazy. Really, I just wanted it storyboarded to work towards turning into a film. Then I thought, 'Well, if I'm going to get somebody to storyboard it, I might as well make a comic book out of the thing,' so I put it out on Craigslist, looking for a comic book artist. 'Here's our website.' I got ten replies back of, 'Oh my God, I'd love to!' Most of them were, 'I've always wanted to do a comic book.' This one guy responded, 'I'm a comic book artist. I've done several comic books, and I would be stoked to work on this project with you.' He's wicked. He's great. His name is Chris Murkley. He's inking it right now. We were hoping to get it done for Fairyworlds, and then we were hoping to get it done for Earthdance but it's looking like it's going to be an over-the-winter project because I don't have the focus for the comic book right now because of the show. It's going to be 4 individual comics with a full color cover and full color middle insert that, at the end of the 4 of them being done, they're going to be piled into a full color graphic novel.

kSea: And on that note, here ends the interview with Hjeron from Mythmaker!