Untitled Document

Trace

audio tour and performance

April 28th - May 2nd 2004

A unique theatrical experience with two integrated parts -
An audio tour through the streets of New York 1919 and a performance in a New York theater 2008.

Trace is a playful meditation on how memories and fantasies are constructed and lost.
We look at the neurological phenomena that allow us to construct a "coherent" vision of the world out of the millions of bits of fragmented sensory and conceptual information we experience daily.

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Audio Tour

Every fifteen minutes two people set out at the same time from two different sites in the city. They walk in the footsteps of two characters from 1919. Their paths cross and diverge only to merge again, ending at the same table in a restaurant.

Duration: approx. 1 hour

Performance

NYC, April 2008, an experimental neuroimaging chamber that allows access to the mind of a New York City bicycle messenger who underwent brain surgery after an accident in Columbus Partk. We follow two doctors as they descend into the bottomless black well of the messenger\s 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.

NYC April 1919.
China Town and Lower East Side.
A warm sunny day. Or is it raining?

The man.

Sweating, he stops and balances himself against a lamppost.
His head hurts. He looks up. They are etching the date into the
doorway of a newly constructed building.

The woman

She has to pee. She hurries along, late for a meeting.
What time is it? A scream, she turns. There is an accident.
She feels watched

They don’t know each other. Not yet.
They go through streets they know. We walk in their footsteps.
Our breath, our thoughts, feelings, reactions mingling with theirs.
What do we see? What did they see? Is this city alive?

It was a warm sunny day. New York.
Or will it be raining?