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| The Performance: | ||||||||
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At the end of a week in which people can sign up for the audio tour, all of the listeners who walked in isolation will be gathered together to make up the audience for a performance. It is night. Up in a small plush theater on 53rd Street and 5th avenue,
everyone, comfortably in their seats, press play on their portable CD
players. After a brief moment there is a familiar gentle voice. This time,
instead of leading them on a tour through the city, it leads them through
a series of relaxation exercises. The lights have been dimmed and suddenly
there are flashes of images on the wall. An incident vaguely recollected
by everyone sitting in the audience. A restaurant. A familiar scene. A
lampshade, a photo on the wall, the door to the kitchen swinging open.
Everyone in the audience has experienced these very things from this very
angle. It is from the tour. The performance picks up where the audio tour
left off. The year is 2008. The setting is a special experimental chamber in the
University Neuro-Surgical Operating Theater that allows access into the
brain of a patient who has undergone brain surgery. The audience is specially
prepared to enter, washed and given a CD player. They take their seats
and prepare themselves for the exploration of the mind of a New York City
Bicycle Messenger who suffered severe memory loss after after an accident
in Mulberry Park four years earlier January 1st, 2004. The audience follows two doctors as they descend into the bottomless
black well of the Messengers memory a place where nothing
is as it seems, where the recent dead intermingle with past loves and
where sea monsters roam the brittle ground.
The Performance is a playful meditation
on the synaptic processes that actually took place in the Brains of each
audience member who walked the paths several days earlier. We investigate
and play with how memories and false memories are constructed and lost.
We look at the neurological phenomenon that allows us to construct a coherent
vision of the world out of the millions of bits of fragmented sensory
and conceptual information we experience daily. And ultimately, by mixing narrative, movement, video and audio, we ask the questions of just what connects us to one another or not, and what can allow us to bridge the conscious divide that seemingly separates us. .
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