Olympia +
Sandman
Performance, 2016
Tales of Hoffman
For the final show of "We Gave Our Best Now The Rest is up to the Hope Chest", the curators and artists for the traveling show were invited to present work in Vienna.
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Because the show traveled along inside of a box, I did a modern twist on the German short story "The Sandman", from which the opera "Tales of Hoffman" originated. During the opening I pretended to be a 300 year old Olympia (an automaton) emerging from the box. The audience wore kaleidoscopic glasses that fractured the light coming off of my sequins performed a dance was based off of the Michael Powell dance film, "Tales of Hoffman"- in which the robot has a breakdown. After the breakdown, my character delivers a monologue about technology and emotion becoming outdated and I teach the audience to project their fantasies on me using Snapchat.
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For the closing of the show, I performed as the title character, 'The Sandman". Because of the history of the Sandman Story influencing Freud’s writings on the Uncanny, I did dream therapy session. I basically asked audience members about their dreams, psychoanalysis them an then gave them solutions to rid themselves of their nightmares. During this timeframe, psychedelic videos played in the background and they also wore the kaleidoscopic glasses.