The Vanishing Play

Quelques images de ma première soirée new-yorkaise passée au St Marks Church Theater pour l'une des dernières représentations de The Vanishing  Play, un délire kitsch d'un onirisme presque lynchien   dans l'univers bariolé des sideshows americains.

"An immigrant actress finds her brother, lost long ago in a freak circus accident, and enlists his help to make her accent disappear. Ghosts of the past appear and lead them on a ritualistic journey where the boundaries of geography, time, life and death begin to vanish. The Vanishing Play explores the struggle to change one’s identity, and the conflict between hanging on and escaping the past.

The Vanishing Play features Woof Nova’s signature mystery noir-adventure style as they delve into an intellectual and aesthetic exploration of Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia. Memory becomes an elusive tool, replaced by rituals performed in order to reconstitute identity, history, and relationships – to rend the veil of time, distance and dimension. The Vanishing Play is a hybrid theater piece that melds movement choreography with a choreo-poetic text, and is set within a constantly transforming multi-media landscape that is manipulated by the performers.

The piece is Woof Nova’s final installment in the trilogy that began with Spoleum (Ontological-Hysteric Theater, 2006), continued with Don’t Peek (LaMama, 2010), and now concludes with their third exploration into the nature of loss. The disappearance of cultures and their singular attributes acts as a provocative ghost haunting the entire trilogy.  With The Vanishing Play the fragility of culture is particularly evoked: the threat of irrevocable loss, balanced with the desire to let go and transform. And the challenge of realizing a future when one is haunted by the ghosts of the past. As with other Woof Nova plays, it is a company-devised piece in which text, design and direction are arrived at through a unique collaborative process."

http://www.thevanishingplay.com/