WREATHE
‘Wreathe’ was first conceived in response to Tarkovsky’s Mirror, drawing on themes of memory, intimacy, and isolation. The work starts with a digital conversation, delivered in monotone by an opaquely clichéd happy couple. We find them tossing and turning in single beds, stuck on their phones. The message thread is a site for them to connect meaningfully, but they find their conversation fraught by misunderstanding and obligation, so that it starts to loop. They keep with the repetition, lest they slip into a blind and fatal frustration with the whole thing. Against this cycle, two performers, masked by flower bouquets, agitate and elaborate on what is left unsaid. Playing with the symmetry of their arrival, finding a pathway of jauntier rhythms, they look to upset the couple’s monotony by building towards an all-out fight. Themes of vulnerability and separation are developed meanwhile in the score, which is composed from a single raw guitar improvisation and fragmented by real-time sampler, synth, and reverb. The makers want to suggest a world of potential meanings and associations for the audience to decipher from the phases presented in movement, text, and music, all surrounding the theme of human connection.
TEXT: Joshua Dolphin & Allyce Morrissey
CHOREOGRAPHY: Danae Baert & Xinran Shi
MUSIC: Donna