Theater and Intimacy: A Conversation with Caitlin Ryan O’Connell & Xandra Clark
In Polylogues, the audience is watching me, and specifically me trying to listen. You’re watching that effort.
In Polylogues, the audience is watching me, and specifically me trying to listen. You’re watching that effort.
If fantasy has the power to instantiate, and maintain such debilitating power structures, could it also be the very force required to undo them?
Here, thoughts are freed from linearity or reasonable binds. There, processing systems allow the universe to expand and retract as an infinite sponge. Where bodies transmute from human familiars to alien exotica.
The Making of King Kong sets out to unpack the monstrosity of our current cultural moment via the monkey, simultaneously evoking a 1930s acting style (transatlantic accents abound) while complicating itself with very-much-now identity politic-infused dialogue.
the art that really connects to me is about the little tiny very specific pieces of life, always needing to retie your shoelace, the way your kid wipes his tears away with his palms, the way someone’s hair looked under a neon sign, the oddly beautiful mold encasing a dead bug at the bottom of a puddle on a mountain
I’ve found it terrifying at times, and surprised about how different it has felt for me. But it’s brought a deeper sort of pleasure, not least of which is that I am so proud of what we’re doing.
While the subject matter is dead serious, the style and aesthetic approach feels giddy, unafraid of big stupid choices when they’re appropriate.
We eventually spend less time on saddles and hats, and more time on trying to get inside that frictional feeling of being pressed into a hookup’s smelly, hairy crotch while he calls you “pretty.”
What does it do to the modernist play, the living room drama, I wonder, when there is no living room, when there’s no home at all? Where does the play go?
I like to provoke an internal movement in the audience, something where their inner life or fantasy is activated.
Yeah we’ve done microphones.
What would it mean, Café Play wonders, if we could be more present– less tweets, phones off, open to chance strangers seated nearby, ears attuned to those around us, and to the creatures and objects outside of our usual frequencies?