Multi-media installation, video and performance,
(7 performers, and three piece band). Performance developed with Michele Sereda
︎The Cave, video - on Vimeo
Étant Ballet - The Cave is a ‘rock opera performance’ set in a world askew with attempts and remnants of civilization. It begins with the aftermath of an incident, an explosion. A group of people run ashore an unexpected landscape. Everything is about to happen, but nothing seems to have changed. How might the alterations to the organic world, the world of matter might affect them? The setting: a mystical landscape, a crash site, in the wild or in the rush of a blackout. The performance is driven by a concern for image, sound, gesture and speech and the staging of living images, of both contemplative or active human presences, performing cursory actions, following instructions, responding to chance, ever moving in shifting assemblages.
Framed by an experimental ‘crash’ choreography, deconstructing text, introducing performers as sculptural figures, the installation casts ‘the visual’ and ‘the theatrical’ as interlocutors. The performance evolves through a series of living images, referencing Adalbert Stifter’s romantic novel Granite (1853), Antoine Watteau’s Voyage to Cythera (1718) and Barnet Schroeder’s film, The Valley (1977), Andrej Zulawski’s On the Silver Globe, questioning the performative possibilities for staging the anticipation of apocalyptic events, whereby the elemental and the catastrophic feature in picturesque descriptions.
Live performance duration: 50 mins
︎PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art, Russia, 2012
︎MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Canada, 2011
Ballet, The Cave, Regina, 2011
