Dutch Kills Theater Company Will Present KLAXALTERIAN SEQUESTER as Part of Edinburgh Festival Fringe's Digital Programme

As we emerge from more than a year spent stuck at home, this immersive sci-fi show asks audiences to see everything surrounding them in a new light. After receiving an urgent message sent from sixty years in the future, the audience is asked to avert an alien invasion by understanding how the KlaxAlterians view our species. Created by Ben Beckley and Asa Wember, KlaxAlterian Sequester utilises the overly-familiar - a smart phone and your own home - to expose our tentative grasp on what we think it means to be human, and what we think we know to be true about the everyday objects which fill our homes. Riffing on the now-common experience of quarantine and isolation, the piece brings the theatre directly into the audience's own private space, transporting them on a time-bending journey where past, present and future disconcertingly merge.

KlaxAlterian Sequester was originally created for the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown and has now been updated for the summer of 2021. Shown as part of the Assembly Showcatcher online programme, the rebooted piece continues its original remit as remotely available theatre which makes a creative virtue out of pandemic restrictions. The creators, Ben Beckley and Asa Wember, developed the original piece over a year and a half with the prestigious writer/creator group Fresh Ground Pepper. It received positive reviews during its earlier run in 2020, with Alexis Soloski from the New York Times stating, "I didn't think that after this many months indoors my tiny apartment could ever seem foreign. But for that hour it did. Even the simple act of sipping a glass of water felt weird and charged."

Writer Ben Beckley said "I hope KlaxAlterian Sequester reminds folks of the interpretive work that goes into being alive, and makes those interpretations feel a bit less inevitable."

Dutch Kills Theater is a theatre company based in New York that focuses on developing and producing new writing by the most exciting emerging artists in the city. Formed in 2011, the company were previously at the Edinburgh Fringe with The Sister by Eric John Meyer and Adventure Quest by Richard Lovejoy in 2016. They followed this with the critically-acclaimed The Providence of Neighbouring Bodies by Jean Ann Douglass in 2018, and Solitary - a searing exploration of the use of solitary confinement in the US prison system by Duane Cooper and Blake Haberman - in 2019.

Booking: www.assemblyfestival | 0131 623 3030

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