by Michael Sammet

Cheese Incident's website was brimming with unsolicited testimonials from many fans claiming that SCI's New Year's Festival in Portland, Oregon was the greatest experience of their lives....even veteran Deadheads who'd been to many legendary Grateful Dead New Years stood forward with this belief. This event was produced by Peak Experience Productions, an unusual rock and roll production company based in Portland, OR. Peak Experience has just announced it's next String Cheese festival - a 3-day camping, music and performance arts event on July 14, 15, 16, 2000 that, judging from the description at www.peakexpereince.cc, promises to be just as, if not more exciting as the New Year's event. It's based on Faerie lore, yes, that's right, faeries, elves, nymphs and gnomes, and happens on the full moon of July - the very same night Shakespeare wrote of in a Midsummer's Night Dream. We recently sat down with Peak Experience co-founder John Dwork (familiar to many of you as co-author/editor of the Deadhead's Taping Compendium) and asked why his concerts are enjoying such high praise, and what's so different about this impending event.

Jambands.com: What made the String Cheese New Year's Eve concert so profound?

John: Several factors. First, the fans of the String Cheese Incident are as proactive a fanbase as any other I've encountered in my 28 years on the scene. They see themselves, even more so than Deadheads did, as an integral part of what makes their scene so special. The DEMAND to be involved, they care deeply about the band, their scene and each other, and they have a great sense of adventure. As I'll explain, they brought a remarkable degree of intention to the New Year's event...perhaps as much as any audience has ever brought to a single rock and roll concert.

Second, our company, Peak Experience Productions, was founded on the premise that concert-goers deserve alot more than the status quo, impersonal cattle roundups most promoters offer their customers as entertainment. For many people these days jam band concerts are, for better and worse, the equivalent of church...or at least that's what they go looking for...that's what we need in our lives...community, ecstatic dance, soulful singalongs, communion with something sacred or special, a heroic adventure, a place to hang our hearts. We've simply recognized this and give people what they want and need.

And just as important; we live in a society which attempts to condition us to be passive, to vicariously experience others living interesting, substantive, meaningful lives. Peak Experience goes to extraordinary lengths to involve the audience in the making of the magic. We've learned this from Bill Graham and the Grateful Dead Experience...only we go alot further than they ever did. When we produce special festivals or concerts for bands such as the Cheese or the Zen Tricksters we write a script based on classic perennial myths and we facilitate the audience getting involved in the theatrical or ritualistic enactment of these allegories. The band becomes the orchestra for a community passion play.

New Year's Eve was so profound because it united professional entertainers, hundreds of audience members acting as performers, event production specialists and families of friends from all over the country with the common goal of creating sacred space in which to greet the year 2000 in safe, high style. The level of intention was nothing short of astounding. We worked intensely via the Internet and in the flesh to birth an intentional celebration of music, art, community and this grand milestone in recorded time.

JAMBANDS.COM: What was the theme?

This past New Year's Eve offered the most amazing moment in our lives so far to perform a ritual honoring the passage of time. And it clearly presented humans with the greatest mystery we've ever been confronted with; the great Y2K moment- though the fear turned out to be unfounded. More people on the planet were concerned about what might happen at that particular midnight moment than about any other moment in history.

So, we posed a question for the event: How can we dance gracefully with the unknown as it unfolds in the moment? The answer wasn't a literal answer, it was metaphorical. We learned that by embracing the worldview of ten archetypes we could prepare for dancing gracefully with the unknown as it unfolds.

The ten archetypes were: The Mystic/Shaman/Magician, Gaia, The Goddess, The Healer, The Happy Child, The Lover, The Wise Ancestor, The Spiritual Warrior, The Holy Phool, and The Great Mystery.

We engaged hundreds of String Cheese fans to make their own elaborate costumes. They studied the archetypes, designed and performed theatrical intitiations for other concert-goers. And they helped design and then performed in a breathtaking, 30 minute long ritual/parade which took place between 11:30PM and midnight which featured giant floats and 15 foot tall animated puppets representing the ten archetypes.

String Cheese, along with members of the Zen Tricksters, played as the fans paraded and a poet read a script describing the worldviews of these archetypes. Not only were the audience members directly responsible for co-creating and enacting a group ritual of mythic proportions, they were doing an action meditation which prepared them for this great moment of uncertainty. They were, in effect, living mythic lives at that moment, dressed as gods and goddesses, shamans, mystics, and sages. It really was, in the truest sense of the word; mythic.

JAMBANDS.COM: How do jam bands fit your philosophy of concert production and what is so special about working with the String Cheese Incident?

John: To begin with, jam bands usually blend many styles of music synergistically into a cohesive whole that is larger than the sum of it's parts. This is a form of alchemy. Synergy, alchemy, improvisation, a sense of adventure, respect for old forms and the courage to create new forms... these are all very valuable skills to learn. My experience has shown me that there is a natural state of chaos in life and embracing these skills I've just mentioned can help us to dance gracefully with this chaos as it unfolds in the moment, to easily go with the flow, and, in doing so, to live a more adventurous and in turn, more meaningful life.

Naturally, this sense of adventure tends to flow off the stage and into the audience... look at the Grateful Dead Experience. String Cheese embodies this same philosophy...only they're learning from mistakes of the past, so their trip is a bit more graceful to start.

So, we recognize that this worldview, this sense of adventure, naturally makes jam band audiences that much more capable of manifesting great adventures in their lives. Peak Experience simply facilitates the realization of this amazing potential into the kinetic state for an audience that hungers for being alive.

JAMBANDS.COM: Well, the word is out... as of this moment your summer event is three quarters sold out and that's without a single ad being purchased, or postcard being sent.

John: In the first 12 hours after we posted the news on the String Cheese website I received somewhere around 100 e-mails from people saying, "look you don't know me, but I was at New Year's Eve and I get IT, so count me in to help make this next event be just as magical. Just tell me how I can help."

I think this speaks of people's hunger to have these non-status-quo Experiences rather than the same old concerts.

JAMBANDS.COM: So, what's this summer festival all about?

John: The theme of this festival is the invocation and embodiment of magical spirits from Faerie folklore to help us rediscover our innate creativity and playfulness in connection with the transformative power and energy of nature.

Besides being a great music festival, we are designing a wide variety of audience-participatory activities based on the idea of "mythic play." We will use the four elements - air, fire, water, earth - as vehicles for identifying and exploring different aspects of the expressive arts. Participants will embody characters from the wide pantheon of Faerie lore as a way in which to more deeply experience this process. Air will represent the phools and thespians. Fire will represent the heroic arts such as fire dancing, juggling, hula hooping, tantra, etc. Water will represent the flowing arts - such as music. Earth will represent the building of art and those who support other artists.

We will also have a Royal Court of the Faerie King and Queen which represents a fifth element of sorts, spirit. This group will set the event tone by performing interactive theater pieces throughout the weekend that will move us collectively through the different evolutions of the weekend's theme.

JAMBANDS.COM: So how does the audience become part of the event?

John: If you go to our website right now you can sign on to a series of listserve discussion groups frequented daily by a rapidly growing number of fans who'll be attending the event. They are working with us to co-create the theatrical elements of the weekend. Collectively, we are discussing what type of costumes to make, what characters to play, what workshops to give/take and how to participate in the theatrical rituals we'll be doing with the entertainers. The ideas people are coming up with are blowing my mind!

JAMBANDS.COM: Do audience members have to dress up in costumes and engage in mythic play?

John: Heavens no! People can just show up and groove to the music. But as time goes on more and more people are figuring out that they can have an exponentially greater degree of fun by joining in on the making of the magic. For some people this means going to our website, joining and participating in our listserve discussion groups, and helping to actually design the whole trip. For others, it'll mean nothing more than taking a workshop at the festival. But based on our New Year's event those who stand at the edges of this next one will wish they had a greater level of participation. Of course they'll be welcomed with open arms. Our philosophy is, "Believe it if you need it, if you don't just pass it on."

JAMBANDS.COM: Where do you see this whole scene moving in the next couple of years?

So long as we survive, there will always be a counterculture. And in turn, there will always be a jam-band scene for freaks like us, or more specifically, a scene in which bands that blend many divergent musical styles together and devote a large amount of their focus towards improvising. The question is; will a majority of people continue to buy into the same old crap that most promoters offer? Shitty venues, high prices, bad sound and lighting, and schedules in which bands play and get off the stage without engaging their fans in the co-creation of magic? Unfortunately, I think so, cause that's what much of our society is conditioned to buy into. Of course, I'm now putting a major amount of my life-force energy into creating an antidote to this. We at Peak Experience are attempting to birth the re-emergence of the ecstatic Dionysian ritual...and perhaps even Ellusian rituals some day. I think the antidote for this pervasive sense of ennui which our society feels, the meaningless lives society conditions us into living, is to create a sense of adventure, of direct participation, of engagement for the audience. My experience tells me that people are desperately hungry for a sense of heroic adventure, that we want/need living myth in our lives. We've got people coming out of every corner of the country saying that they want to help us live these dreams together.

As for specific events we're investigating the possibility of doing a String Cheese Incident on the moon.... you know, the moon is made of cheese...as far as we're concerned it's a perfect fit. I've been trying to convince Michael Kang to write a song called, "Sea of Tranquility" just for that gig. Just the thought of Billy Nershi struggling to play slide guitar in a space suit is enough to keep me chucklin' through the day.