The exploration represented in this site is an attempt to communicate how Tarot has facilitated my final Independent Research Project (IRP) as part of the Advanced Devising Practice program through Rose Bruford College in collaboration with Arthaus Berlin..

When I started this journey, I had no experience with Tarot. I was always told it was a dangerous tool that opened a portal into "the bad stuff". Perhaps this was the initial reason that made me interested. Tarot seemed to me a combination of many things present in my life: interaction, uncertainty, playfulness, imagery, and the possibility to use an external medium to  explore internal conflicts. 

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Uncertainty.  It's hard to talk about this process without acknowledging the effects of the global pandemic. The pandemic made uncertainty in trusting my version of reality all the more present. It upended  my belief that I would always be in a collaborative process when it came to theatre. I was reminded that despite my plans for collaborative process and performance for my IRP, most people and potential audience members had spent the last year in isolation dealing with their suppressed freedom, myself included. Fitting to the Arthaus pedagogy, it was an imposed global Night Sea Journey. I was fortunate to learn that Uncertainty and The Great Unknown, while immensely difficult, held the golden promise of serendipity. The period of solitude resulted in my delving into new mediums including line drawing, videography, and my long abandoned (but not lost ) writing. Tarot economises this feeling of serendipitous uncertainty into a simple deck of cards from which perhaps a resonant discovery is made. 

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 The playfulness of my exploration in mediums is also present in the random nature of a tarot deck. In my initial research of Tarot I was delighted to discover it was originally a simple parlor game (Farley 2009) . It’s playful nature then lent itself to the ritual of today’s tarot culture. Each card represents something, but the combinations are endless and their reading exists in many different layers. Though more mystic and alternative methods of tarot insist on a definitive way of interaction, they are still a game and can be switched up, shuffled, redrawn, and tossed aside in a convergence of control and spontaneity. While originally the deck was designed for many to play, it diversified as a solitary as well as social practice. 

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Tarot introduces two characters of the reader, and the read (referred here as drawer and interpreter). It allows connection with another being in the creation of meaning, similar to my collaborative process in devised theatre. While my first year was all about collaborative play, my second year became focused more on the roots of my practice in search of my individual core interests, almost forcefully so with the added isolation of the pandemic. Playful experiments with the cards interpret meaning in your own life, or answer questions guiding you on your journey. The spirit of play embodies that of a trickster, an enchantress, a champion, and a villain; it is a journey with each drawing and interpretation similar to the journey of the archetypes of the cards themselves present. 

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The journey of the major arcana seemed to embody what I was undergoing as a creative artist. In the year of Arthaus I had already experienced I had cultivated skills in a linear way coming in as a fresh face and learnin each new skill leading up to the final module The Poetic Body.  In my second and cumulative year I was expecting to deconstruct these skills and elements of the journey thus far and see the various combinations that would arise in new forms of work. The  visual journey of the major arcana could be used to deconstruct my growth as an artist. The game of tarot could be view now as an event of three: drawer, interpreter, and now creator/artist. Appreciation of the traditional set of cards would offer a loose guide for my own visual interpretation. All three presences of the drawer, interpreter, and creator are me. 

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This is not a finished project. This site explores three roles of tarot: the drawer, the interpreter, and the creator. My relationship with Tarot has undoubtedly shifted in the process. It has become the silent central point to all the seemingly random products of my journey, a tool for the work to come. I invite you to explore, ask questions, and find the meanings for you. 

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There are seven segments to this project: Introduction, The Drawer, The Interpreter, The Creator, Conclusion, and Play. They can be accessed through the homepage image.