Making Peace
Making Peace started a few weeks after the false missile alert in Hawaii. It began with an interest in exploring the epistemological definition of apocalypse, “to uncover or reveal”, and the game, “Catch”. Catch was contextualized as a trope that might represent the seed of a memory, casting a signal of the game’s moment beyond its occurrence. This then generated the idea that a nuclear bombing is a game of catch that ends after one throw, which led to the question: what remains after a game of catch is over?
Each performer generated their own character under the instruction to “create a character for yourself of someone or something that died”. The incredibly wide range of characters that resulted included everything from a communist nine-month-old, to an astronaut, to the apocalypse, itself. From there, we put these characters in continual dialogue and used these improvisations as the basis for parts of the piece. The resulting work had three parts: Everyone dies, they transition, and then question where they are. In the end the work became about failing to settle the question of “what happens after”, and realizing that everything that could be imagined post-apocalypse would be an artificial construction. |