Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts has announced the world premiere of #0 (a space opera), a highly physical, semi-improvised, evening-length performance about a small band of humans who live on a future world with no name. Created bySheldon B. Smith and Lisa Wymore,#0 runs June 20 - 22, 2014 at CounterPULSE in San Francisco. The company will present a work in progress showing at Motion Pacific in Santa Cruz, May 16-17.
Following the enormous success of his collaboration with Scott Wells on Father On last fall, Smith this year returns to the artistic partnership he and Wymore have shared for more than a decade. Recognized for their witty choreography and visual design, the award-winning husband-and-wife team has performed for audiences throughout the U.S. and Europe.
In #0 Smith/Wymore enter the realm of science fiction. In the not-so-distant future, a group of five humans band together for companionship and survival on a foreign world where individual memories, dreams and identities are "outsourced" to cloud servers. No longer able to distinguish between the operating system and themselves, the humans' only hope is for a software upgrade earned by mastering games of mental, physical and spiritual endurance. Their life is simultaneously comical and bleak.
Smith and Wymore are joined on stage by performers
James Graham,
Ian Smith-Heisters and Pei-Ling Kao. An additional role is performed by a computer operating system, whose protocols were conceived and developed jointly by Smith and Smith-Heisters. In the spirit of Merce Cunningham's chance operations, #0 unfolds according to the sequence of commands issuing from the operating system; but unlike Cunningham's modernist example, the chance elements in #0 happen in real time, preventing the performers from memorizing a sequence in advance.
"We've created a set of circumstances in #0 in which the performers are asked, in a certain sense, to 'survive' the moment-by-moment unpredictability of a work that is continuously shaped by what appears to be an intelligent and authoritarian power," says Smith.
"#0 is a piece about the future," adds Wymore, "but it's also about where we are now in our relationship with technology and the choices we have about how we want to evolve."
Tickets for the work in progress in Santa Cruz are $16 in advance and $20 at the door. To purchase, visit motionpacific.com or call 831-457-1838. For #0's world premiere in San Francisco tickets are $15 in advance, $20 at the door, and may be purchased online at CounterPULSE.org or by calling 415-626-2060.
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