All I have are questions......
I concluded my residency with the Urbano Project in early April ! Our final performance explored four scenes and ran just about 30 minutes. We explored similar themes of Art and Technology as in the Portals Workshop except we took a wider view, imagining far into the future 100 years. What practices in our society will seem absurd to future generations? What will be lost to technology as we continue to become a more digital society? The name for the class was Myths for the 22 Century, as we researched what it may be like to view our culture from that perspective. We also thought of how across the world, people have created myths to explain the chaos of life. Monsters, magic and the fantastical have been used to explain parts of our lives that don't make sense; parts that feel to big to comprehend, parts that feel overwhelming. So with a lens for social justice, we created a fictional outline describing time travelers and predators. We were informed by the feeling of apocalypse many people had heard about over the discourse of the pandemic. We thought about the ways technology preys on us, but also considered how technology can be helpful if we use it in a different way. Through movement and discussion we researched:
What hunts you?
What lives in your body?
Tell us a story from June 2020
What are you grieving today?
What is the way forward?
What is the definition of freedom?
Where do you feel the computer in your body?
What part of your body is the most mechanized?
Have you seen Terminator 2? Have you seen Blade Runner? Have you seen West World? What do you think?
What is a pandemic or other disaster from before your lifetime? How did you learn about it?
What rituals do you / your friends / your family have?
How do we consume information about the past? How might someone in 2120 find out about our time?
What is one version of an apocalypse you imagine could happen in our world?
What did people fear in 1920? What might people of 2120 think we fear now?
Are there any ways in which technology provides relief?
How did the pandemic change you? Did it? Did you let it? Why or why not?
What is a Before and After event in your life?
Below you can see our incredible cast! I have also included promo images created by dancer Agatha Dorigo. We all had such a blast together. In the next few weeks, I will create a trailer video with live footage of the show. We put it all together with a DIY set, analogue and digital projectors and some very simple props including textiles and lanterns. We experimented with using the space around the Foundry in new ways and we purposely had the performers mingle in and out of the audience throughout the show. We never came up with a title because we also did not surface a beginning, middle or end! The project was very much a residency in which something was birthed and began to take form, but was never really finished. We plan to take 10 more weeks in the summer to develop the work further and create a final iteration. Perhaps after that we will have a name for the piece!
More documentation of the work can also be found on my instagram in the stories archive under
" Collaborations."