(in development)
After a pause in our collaboration for maternity leave and a global pandemic, we will be joining forces once again to develop a live music-theater performance, producing a portable production that blends projection with an easily assembled set. However, as we are still living amongst covid surges, we will simultaneously be devising short video experiments for social media and live-streamed performances.
With A Living Shell, we are developing a second chapter of our 2017 production, Containertopia, a satirical revue about the tiny living movement, its attractiveness and environmental promise, and concurrent issues of affordability, access, and gentrification. Continuing our examination of zoning politics, A Living Shell will also delve into the environmental needs of housing in our current era. As cities flood, countrysides burn, and housing markets inflate, where can we make our home? What is our community doing to make space for us all?
Our muse for A Living Shell is the oyster. The mollusk has been a New York resident for millennia, feeding rich and poor, indigenous and immigrant. Its shells paved our streets and built our buildings, its reefs were over-harvested and contaminated, and its reintroduction may be what saves our waterways. We began our project February-May 2022 with a residency at Governor's Island through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center.
Our previous work has centered on the inequities in the housing market and the tech world. Thematically, our work often grapples with social and economic inequality in ways that playfully yet thoughtfully engage with the complications and contradictions of our subjects. Who is being neglected by innovation and development as we propel through the twenty-first century? What might we learn from the labor movements of the last century or the environmental toll of recent human history? How can performance engage in with these tangled questions to highlight both the immediate need for action and the existential humor of the moment in a way that news headlines can’t quite capture? We challenge ourselves to continue to make affordable, accessible work that fully employs of-the-moment audio/visual technology, exposing the unethical, embracing the humorously absurd, and striving for the inclusive.