Greek mythology tells us that Orpheus, master of song, descends into the underworld to retrieve Eurydice from death. Desperate to restore sense to a senseless loss, his song moves Hades and Persephone to grant her return. On the threshold of the upper world, he glances back at Eurydice, lacking blind faith that she follows. His forbidden glance destroys whom he seeks to save, an attempt at control leaving him at a greater loss.

A breakdown in a signifying chain propels new possibilities. With meaning-making under duress, symbolic order cannot be reconstructed without abstraction. Orpheus’s backward glance collapses into immediacy. But music and painting, like magic and mania, map complexity through frameworks to restore coherence. Loss becomes the condition of creation, and creation that of loss.

Orpheum enacts two theories of control. One turns toward the material where representation dissolves, another toward the site where representational systems take hold. In two acts, Orpheum stages a split in subjectification: material faith against symbolic order, embodied desire against operative unconscious. A loss of relation, within and between the two, sets the world in motion.