Body of Knowledge

an interactive performance work exploring how awareness and feeling live in our bodies, how knowledge of and debate on environmental issues and political issues exist alongside personal and private realities.

February 11-13 and 18-20

at Mondavi Vanderhoef Studio Theater, University of California, Davis

February 24 - March 6

in San Francisco and Santa Cruz (alternating evenings with Axolotl), venues TBA

As a "post-dramatic" performance work, Body of Knowledge does not intend to give answers or present a clear narrative. Instead, the work is an event that can be observed from many vantage points, both physically and philosphically. It is a "happening" involving elements of dance, theater, music, soundscape, and video, as well as mundane (or not-so-mundane) conversation. Audience wander through an installation of video projections invoking environments both human and "wild" and meet the performers in encounters both ordinary and extra-ordinary. Sometimes the encounter is from the distance of the withdrawn observer. Sometimes, if audience members choose, the encounter is less mediated by intellectual or physical distance as audience members present themselves for more direct encounter with performers.

The work, involving a group of actors, dancers, performance artists, and musicians from around North America, will engage with interlocking issues of...

-how feeling and thought live in the body
-how the environment we live in affects how we live, think, and feel
-how private thoughts coexist alongside personal interactions and a global web of interaction. what is the place of intimate relation in a world of global processes
-how we process knowledge of the environmental and political realities that we live in... how much information we can process and how we choose how much to know
-how we tell the difference between utopian or dystopian fantasies and the world as it is
-what we choose to take as our responsibility, what we desire, what we decide is beyond our control
-what place art has in our lives in a world marked by constant signals of crisis
-how the personal, the social, the environmental, and the political are all threads of our lives known through our bodies

The piece is not an answer, but an opportunity to question. Many things occur simultaneously. We can never experience everything. Sometimes we choose to watch. When do we get involved?

***Come early for a pre-show installation of videos collaging interviews with academics, activists, and artists engaged in environmental, political, and social issues that are shaping our world with video meditations on environments of greater or lesser human presance or impact

*** stay after the show for a convivial salon to discuss issues that arise during the piece over tea, coffee or a beer!

photo by Jenna Blue from Proximity 2008

photo by Karl Frost from the Dancing Wilderness Project 1997

photo by Jenna Blue from Proximity 2008

from the Dancing Wilderness Project 2003

photo by Anson Smith from Proximity 2008

photo by Vu Nguyen from Close Quarters 2007