Author: ida

This Foreign Concept + The Plastic Arts
Present:
Time! (and/or Progress?)

Performances
Thursday-Sunday @ 19:30

Free Performance August 5
Friday-Sunday 5 Euros

The Show
Time! (and/or Progress?) is the first collaboration between performance companies This Foreign Concept and The Plastic Arts. The collaboration will take the form of a joint performance called TIME! ( and/or Progress?) The piece explores themes of time and its passage by utilizing time theory, specifically the Theory of Recurrence, as a theatrical device. The piece will attempt to expose the idea that we ultimately cannot know the meaning of anything, thereby celebrating the absurd, the fantastic, and the potentially scientific: the endless possibilities of our existence.

The Companies
This Foreign Concept is an international performance ensemble with core members currently residing in Berlin, Copenhagen, and New York City. By living in multiple places we are consistently growing our individual exposure to new and diverse performance practices, then returning to each other to share these ideas in order to expand and deepen our generative process in the studio. Our main interest, besides the creation of new work, is the continuous exchange of art-making ideas and techniques gained from our individual cultural environments. We hope to expand this exchange to an ever widening international artistic community as we continue to show our work around the world. This Foreign Concept is interested in capturing and capitalizing on the uniqueness of sharing the experience of live performance with the audience – of stripping away the formalities and personalizing the experience without pandering.

The Plastic Arts is a collaboration between performance artist Jake Hooker and theatre designer Tláloc López-Watermann. The work takes the shape of performance/lectures in which fact, fiction, and various histories (personal and public) are woven together into multi-media, interdisciplinary “talks” on various subjects. Or, as Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia, 1922 would have it: “To Inspire ambition, to stimulate the imagination, to provide the inquiring mind with accurate information told in an interesting style, and thus lead into broader fields of knowledge — such is the purpose of this work.”

The Work
This Foreign Concept’s rehearsal and devising process is facilitated by the director but all content is generated by the ensemble. We collaborate with designers in the room to create the theatrical world as we make the show itself. The piece will be constructed from a variety of source texts including the play Time and the Conways by JB Priestly and its original source, An Experiment with Time by JW Dunne, which sets forth his “Theory of Recurrence.” According to Dunne, all time is happening simultaneously: the past, present, and future are one. From this idea we construct an event that does the same, weaving together the disparate strands of several distinct, but overlapping, possible performances.

For the first time, The Plastic Arts will utilize the source material of other artists – as well as their organization of the stage space – as fodder for a lecture. Both companies will utilize additional sources such as classic radio shows, podcasts, scientific lectures and research, and found video. What will result is a kind of performance palimpsest where the layers of rich and diverse material become new language, music, song, gesture, and dance. Rather than being episodic and collage-like we seek to create a harmoniously inter-woven unified piece. The texts, rather than existing to motivate, justify, or explain, contribute to the whole as a supporting layer in the dense visual and aural landscape.

Please visit http://vimeo.com/channels/thisplasticconcept for selected work samples.