The Story of coralia: rehearsal of the act iii

In alchemy, the storm is the Confusio - a state of chaos where elements clash. When the storm passes, what remains on the shore is the “White Elixir” or the “Salt of Wisdom”. Coralia is that crystalized result, post-storm lucidity. She is calm, but it is a heavy, earned calm - the silence of someone who has seen the depths and survived.

I see her on the seashore… The seashore is the ultimate Liminal space, the boundary between the “Lower World” (the depths of the psyche) and the “Upper World” (conscious reality). Coralia is the messenger who brings the secrets of the sea to the land.

Coralia is homunculus of the deep. She appears after storm standing as the silent witness of the transformation of chaos into silence. She is the evidence that matter can be transformed into feeling, and that the storm eventually calms.

In my Theatre of Matter Coralia is not a static object; she is the metamorphosis happening right in front of the viewer, living “calcination” (in alchemy - it’s the process of heating of substance until it turns to ash or stone) from sea water to the salt of the soul. She represents the “Post-storm Lucidity”, the moment the physic crisis ends and a new orientation begins. She does not speak, she filters. Her crown is heavy with the “vegetative soul” - porous coral like growth of her thoughts. Look closely at her chest - the hollow “ports”. These are not wounds, she just has let go the “weight of the psyche” and transformed in to vessel that the wind and sea can play like a flute.

I am Coralia. I am what the water is trying to say before it broke against the rocks. Look at my chest - see the hollows where the sea once pressed against my heart? I have let the pressure carve me. I have traded the “weight of the psyche” for these apertures becoming a flute for the wind to play. I know the secrets of the sea - the ones that only surface after the storm. I have come to the shore to breath. I am the moment your chaos finally learns to think…