We also worked from a more troubling perspective on transformation found in "The Age of Spiritual Machines" by author Ray Kurzweill. This book compellingly predicts that the continued exponential growth of technology will allow us to download a human mind into a working silicon replacement by the year 2050. Such an operation represents a moment of frightening transformation that will likely be accompanied by great doubt for the first person to do so. This uncertainty may center at first on the question "will I survive the transformation?" but ultimately will become "who will I be afterwards?" What will be lost that cannot be regained?

The Chemical Wedding explores these two notions of transformation by presenting the audience with two parallel protagonists: a Christian Rosenkreutz of the past and a Christian Rosenkreutz of the future.

The character of the past is set in 1459, the year given in the alchemical manifesto. His side of the story is told primarily through choreography, music and surrealistic video imagery. We want to recreate what we felt when reading the book: the sense of strange beauty found in the imagery, the sense of mystery created by the coded symbolic references and a sense a wonder at the outcome of the alchemical process.