Stephen Varble began Journey to the Sun as a series of performances with projected slides in 1978. After becoming notorious for unauthorized costume performances on Soho streets in the mid 1970s, Varble receded from his public persona at this time. Deriving from his identification with his idol, the reclusive actress Greta Garbo, and informed by the spiritual practice of Subud, Varble began writing an allegorical epic about a musician, the Grey Crowned Warbler, who undergoes tribulation and metamorphosis on a journey to transcendence. He turned to video by 1980 for its ability to be reproduced and distributed. Working with a shifting group of collaborators under the name “The Happy Arts School of Manuscript Illumination,” Varble focused his energies on Journey to the Sun and related decorative drawings for his Riverside Drive apartment in New York, where most scenes were taped. He dressed himself and his actors in the costume sculptures that had made him notorious, and he wrote extended monologues framing the story’s improvised scenes. Journey to the Sun is a freewheeling, loosely autobiographical fable that tells of the transformations and trials of the Warbler, played by Varble, under the hand of Sage Purple Pythagoras, played by Varble’s partner and collaborator Daniel Cahill.