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Before my research, the unicorn in my head was cartoonish, floating on rainbows, evoking in five-year-old boys and girls a sense of wonder. However, the more I learned of this illusive creature’s rich past, the more I became enamored with its realness. The unicorn we imagine today is in truth a very recent depiction. Humans accepted the spherical nature of the earth long before they decided that the unicorn did not actually exist. However, what kept this mirage creature alive and very real in the global consciousness for centuries was humanity's hope to claim, to control, and to commodify the unicorn's body—most specifically its horn—while disregarding the life of the animal itself. It is through our art and our discourse that the unicorn survived through time. Ironically, the subject of both was consistently its death. Though the unicorn may not have ever actually existed, the illusion of its elusive breathing body was so potent that its historical footprint is global. Its “existence” influenced literature, art, religion, the economy, and breakthroughs in the science of horn growth.

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When I began researching the history of the unicorn, I hoped to find evidence of some strange society that worshipped the magical beast as a living god, but instead I found only the desire to kill it, use its parts, and name it as an incarnation of Jesus Christ in the hopes of popularizing a new religion. Though I did not find what I was looking for, my imagined society lives in The Natural History of the Unicorn(‘s HORN!) and acts as a juxtaposition to the story of their god’s real history dating back to 398 BCE. This society travels seamlessly through centuries channeling prominent characters from the unicorn’s history in order to tell its story. They then perform kinetically oriented sound rituals shedding these characters in the celebration of their god.
 

The Natural History of the Unicorn(‘s HORN!) exists as an Embodied Shame Pole. Shame poles, a form of totem poles, are created with the intent of shaming an individual, institution, or structure into action. An Embodied Shame Pole is a term that I use to define a work of theater or performance art that holds similar intentions. Unlike the shame pole, aspiring for immediate and direct action to take place in accordance with its will, the Embodied Shame Pole is more concerned with change in a metaphysical sense. It seeks to broaden the awareness of its spectators. Shame breeds a new arrangement of ideas; it realigns reality for the one experiencing it. By extending a feeling of shame to the audience in regard to the subject, the Embodied Shame Pole attempts to shift their metaphysical relationship to that subject. I neither expect nor desire my work to cause a specific shift in the spectator’s physical actions following the performance.  Rather I hope to plant a seed that causes them to think differently about the subject.