Embracing the here and now

There are hundreds upon thousands of quotations out there in the world about death and its inscrutability, and about seizing each moment of your life with awareness. They range from the brilliant to the trite, from the hackneyed to the fresh, and really any particular arrangement of words can be either, depending on the receptiveness of the reader. We all “know” things on any number of levels, from the visceral reaction of our guts to the airy intellectual castles of our reason.

Jon Mueller acknowledges that to him, “living in the present means not just being conscious of your experiences, but how you interpret them, how they affect you, and what you can do with them, even conceptually.”

Being fully present is taking sensory input and interpreting it, finding threads and patterns and ideas in the things you experience, and being conscious enough of the input you take in to do these things on the spot, using your conscious mind.

But perhaps being fully present involves all of those levels, from our base senses to our reasoned thoughts. Jon Mueller’s Death Blues (No Time Like The Present) seeks to explore the certainty of death and the necessity of embracing the now using all of these things: sight and sound, touch, taste and smell, and (further) the ability to put them all together. Mueller’s drumming (which could be described as transcendent on its own) is joined by an impressive collection of Milwaukee musicians (members of Altos, Juniper Tar, Field Report, Testa Rosa, and The Celebrated Workingman) weaving vocal harmonies and hammered guitars that alternate between funereal and pure metal.

And that’s just the sound.

Choreographer Molly Shanahan and designer Dylan Schleicher will bring your eyes, as well as your touch, to the feast. Schleicher is designing a labyrinth for Alverno’s Pitman Theater, and Mueller is careful to point out that a labyrinth is not a maze. A maze would seem to obfuscate the idea of being fully present in your now – if you don’t know where you are, it’s hard to pay attention – but a labyrinth has a clear path to the center. Labyrinths, according to Mueller, “represent a process, a quest.” Death Blues (No Time Like The Present) is the quest to find the fullness of the now.

Taste and smell will be provided by And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Crumbs, pop-up restauranteurs that recently held a sold-out (and utterly gorgeous) event at Schleicher’s studio home. Mueller’s motivation for utilizing taste and smell is that they are the most personal of the sensory avenues: everyone’s taste palette is ever-so-slightly distinct, and the ways in which smell is connected to memory are well-documented. (Who hasn’t tried cramming for different exams with different perfumes to try and trigger smell-memory? Or is that just me?) Triggering this scent-memory makes the performance of Death Blues unique for each person, and perhaps guides them to consider the patterns and threads of their own lives, and appreciate their own now and their own inevitable demise.

Mueller told me that “Life is complicated.” And it is. But unlike many who view complication as stress and the-now-ubiquitous-concept of drama, Mueller follows up with, “That’s interesting.” And he’s right: complex is not bad; it’s interesting.

If we all spent a little more time paying attention, perhaps we could see that. Death Blues takes this and couples it with the urgency of realizing we have no idea how long we have to accomplish anything, and sends us out to use our senses and our reason to become fully present, aware people.

Death Blues (No Time Like The Present) will be at Alverno College’s Pitman Theater this Friday and Saturday, Nov. 16 and 17. Ticket availability and information at alvernopresents.alverno.edu/pages/shows/Jon-Mueller.aspx. Learn more about Jon Mueller/Death Blues at rhythmplex.com and deathblues.com.