The Array: The Shape of the Galaxy
Year: 2019
Creative team
- Commissioned Creators: Elysse Cheadle, Erika Mitsuhashi, Francesca Frewer, Tim Carlson, Pippa Mackie
- Directed and Co-created by Elysse Cheadle, Tim Carlson, Veronique West & Daniel Martin
- Performed by Robert Azevedo, Keely O’Brien and Martin Reisle; Erika Mitsuhashi, Francesca Frewer; the band Azure Leaf (Didier Brule -Champagne and Ilana Zackon); and Arash Khakpour & Dave Mott
- Design by Jono Kim
- Musical performance by DJ Flyte
About
Four Vancouver based companies have been commissioned to create an evening of 15-20 minute short performances examining the same theme. The theme for 2019 is: The Shape of the Galaxy.
Why The Array? In Astrophysics, an array is a group of satellites and telescopes which can be trained on a single phenomena to provide a more detailed, nuances, and multi-dimensional understanding of the subject than could be gained by a single instrument. The Array proposed the teams of artists as telescopes.
Commissions
Big Bang Bang
Elysse Cheadle
A composition for slants, hand tools, gravity, and Velcro Piano. Driven by stubborn curiosity, Big Bang Bang plays irresponsibly with some pretty elemental properties of physics, with (literal) construction and deconstruction, and largely: with the properties of Velcro. We’re going to get loud, get stuck, get inverted, and try to figure out how it all began.
The shape of something changes as you move through it
Erika Mitsuhashi and Francesca Frewer
Relation and the unknown. Collaborators explore the precarious space between otherness and togetherness. When we find ourselves faced with fundamental uncertainty, how do we make sense of ourselves, our perceptions, and one another? Through formal experimentation with movement, text, and theatrical artifice, they use these questions to explore ideas surrounding agency and subjectivity.
The light we’ll never see (working title)
Theatre Conspiracy
Sonic array explores light and darkness. The light we’ll never see is a spacy song cycle touching on the complicated relationship between creative and destructive cosmic forces, the bond between speculation and technology, and how discovery inspires both humour and horror.
Starman
Upintheair
A man, his chair, and a pact to never leave his room. tarman is a dark comedy about a man and the hungry sucking loneliness that has led him to lock himself in his room for the rest of his life. Through his very unpopular VLOG – Daryl (aka Starman) will take his internet “friends” on a journey into his chosen exile. But Starman’s isolation may lead him to confront a part of himself he never knew existed.