FEBRUARY 20–22, 2015
Presented by the 2015 Getty Villa Theater Lab Series
in collaboration with Automata and Los Angeles Performance Practice
Tungsten (artery)
(A Work-in-Progress Performance)
Directed by Janie Geiser
Written by Erik Ehn
Tungsten (artery) is a multidisciplinary puppet play that merges bunraku puppetry, shadows, video, sound, and text to create an elliptical rumination on our transience, our earthliness, our dust. Tungsten (artery) is a meditation on mortality in an age where the lines between life and death are blurred.
A young woman is serially born and eaten by the planet. Going back and forth from grave to rebirth, experience grows confused - earth is space and the moon is dirt. The earth’s balance shifts; a new sense of anticipation and disruption in earth’s natural cycles stirs the world - massive meteorological time contracted and newly written; a startling wildness is now familiar.
Tungsten(artery) centers on Cora, a contemporary Persephone, whose existential dilemma forms the center of the play. Half-asleep on a commuter train entering New York City, Cora struggles to remember where she is coming from, and where she is going. Tungsten (artery) imagines Cora’s search for meaning, as she grapples with her responsibilities, her existential exhaustion, and the increasingly unfamiliar world of the upper air.
*****ALL PERFORMANCES AT THE GETYY VILLA AUDITORIUM*****
Performed by: Molly Allis, Jenny Greer, Youssif Kamal, Moira MacDonald, Alexis Macnab Erin O’Donnell, Whitney Rodriguez, Jessica Rosilyn, Hilario Saavedra
Scene Design: Shannon Scrofano
Lighting Design: Ellie Rabinowitz
Video Design: Carole Kim
Sound Design: Colbert Davis
Costume Design: Sandra Burns and Sarah Brown
Associate Sound Design: John Eagle
Additional Music: Cassia Streb
Puppet Design: Janie Geiser
Films: Janie Geiser
Production Stage Manager: Cameron Squire
Producer: Miranda Wright
Tungsten (artery) is supported, in part, through a Getty Villa Theater Lab Residency and a Jim Henson Foundation Project Grant.