5 Years Gallery - Free School Library

Doctor Black, Bearer Of Bad News: 
The Law Of Seven 
5 Years Gallery – Free School, Bethnal Green Library Lecture Hall

Performative lecture and part reenactment of the lecture given in Constantinople in 1920 by the Fourth Way mystic, ‘the unknowable’ – Georges Gurdjieff, focusing on the Law of Octaves. 

Comprising of an introduction to some of the initiatory practices within the secret esoteric doctrine of the Work. The lecture title ‘Doctor Black, Bearer of Bad News’, includes a character his original audience would have been familiar with from folklore; the ‘bad news’ being that the audience would be told that they were currently residing in a very obscure place in the universe at the mercy of a descending octave and with only a slim chance that they would even remember where they were. This was named as ‘the terror of the situation’. 
The lecture’s concern is the musical theory of the structure of the octave as a device with which to examine psychological and cosmological processes. 

Fundamental to the performance of the lecture is an exploration of the peculiarities of remembering; a process explored as part of a larger set of practices in the so called Fourth Way.