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Terry Marks-Tarlow
Cracked Orlando is based on Vivaldi’s adaptation of an epic 15th poem by Ariosto. The story is quite psychological, about a man who goes crazy with unrequited love. We started with the thinnest narrative thread in Italian, drawn from Vivaldi’s original libretto. I added English fragments to complement fractals in Jonathan’s music. I “grew” them according to the Fibonacci sequence, which keeps adding the last two terms and is self-similar in form, by preserving part/whole relations. I initiated 4 Fibonacci “bushes,” beginning with one, two, three, and four words. For thematic content I drew upon Jungian archetypes of number: one represents wholeness; two, polarity/fight; three, change/dynamics; four, resolution/manifestation. I treated the growing bushes like poetry, a kind of Haiku, and then color coded the results and threaded the growing English through the Italian narrative. After seven iterations, the English overpowered the Italian to culminate in an 84 word aria for Orlando.
-Terry Marks-Tarlow
Terry Marks-Tarlow is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Santa Monica, California. She specializes in creative blocks, self-expression and deep transformation and teaches developmental affective neurobiology at the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute. She draws, dances, practices and teaches yoga, and has authored and edited several books. Her most recent, Psyche’s Veil: Psychotherapy, Fractals and Complexity, marries the science, art and spirituality of psychotherapy. To view a children’s improvisational dance interpretation of this book, download the first chapter, find out more about her psychotherapy practice, or see samples of art prints and cards, visit
