Life In Five Seasons
Life in Five Seasons was staged as a durational performance installation unfolding in five scenes over the course of 6 hours at PLAY/GROUND WNY 2019, Medina, NY.
The performance features a live director / puppeteer (played by me), and a rotating cohort of 15 inter-species creatures performed by a cast of volunteers with varying degrees of performing experience (ranging from none to professional). The creatures (who I refer to as the puppets) are defined by their full-head masks, made by me from paper mache. The five scenes of this work correspond to the five stages of life and seasons:
Scene 1: Spring / Conception / Birth / Infancy / Orgy / Euphoria / Garden of Eden / Land of Oz / Midsummer Night's Dream / Introduction / ETC.
Scene 2: Summer / Childhood / Innocence / Play / Power / Bullying / Fantasy / Emulation / Attention-Approval Seeking / Homework / Pied Piper
Scene 3: Fall / Adolescence / Broody / Melodramatic / War / Vanity / Transition / Courtship / Identity / Fantasy
Scene 4: FINTER (Fall-Winter) / Early-Middle Adulthood / Working Times / Assembly Line / Productivity / Repetition / Work-place Affairs / Efficiency / Purpose / Anticlimactic
Scene 5: Winter / Adulthood-Old Age-Death / Peace / Love / Wise / Kind / Amnesia / Responsible / Grumpy / Painful / Broken / Nostalgia / Reality
This performance was never rehearsed. Each scene was performed several times in a row until I felt like it successfully landed, and then we moved on to the next scene. The audience was free to come and go from the installation.
