The Chocolate Factory Theater presents Daria Faïn in "patch the sky with 5 colored stones"
Company:
Daria Faïn
24-Hour Virtual Communal Gathering
Saturday to Sunday, November 14-15, 2020
12pm EDT to 12pm EDT via Zoom link
The Chocolate Factory Theater is thrilled to announce the world premiere of patch the sky with 5 colored stones, a new work instigated by choreographer, director and performer Daria Faïn with 15 international collaborators which will be released online throughout Fall 2020.
Originally conceived as a solo performance with special appearances by Faïn’s long time collaborators (intended to premiere at The Chocolate Factory Theater in September 2020) celebrating her 60th birthday and the culmination of 40 years of research into the body/mind embodiment within architecture, language, spirituality and communal action (drawn from Daria’s ongoing work with poet/architect Robert Kocik in the Commons Choir), patch the sky with 5 colored stones will now unfold in two separate but deeply related strands.
The first, a series of original short films adapted from Daria’s solo work and collaborative duets with choreographers/performers Melanie Maar and David Thomson - informed by her decades-long investigation into the divine feminine - will be produced at The Chocolate Factory’s current and future spaces throughout September.
Concurrently, a 24-hour online gathering hosted via Zoom and collectively authored by the collaborative team (open to the public with a suggested donation, advance registration required) will take place from November 14 at 12:00pm EST to November 15 at 12:00pm EST.
This 24-hour online gathering is not a performance - rather, it is a reflection on not having a performance and what it means to come together artistically, from our respective domestic spaces, without the organizing framework of the “show”. Audience members are welcome to “come” and “go” as they please throughout the 24-hour period. Attempting to carve out a soft and contemplative ‘time parenthesis’ within the framework of our collective digital overload, the collaborative team of Patch the Sky will undertake a durational exercise in free association, emphasizing the casual as a source of creativity as they share fragments of work, materials, recipes, conversations, scores, and the absence of those things - all of it in service to the practice of “not making”.
Embracing the uncertainty and dislocation of the global lockdown, in March 2020 Daria and her collaborators - an international group of performers, composers, designers, poets, architects and filmmakers - began to gather weekly for durational rehearsals via Zoom. Originally intended to facilitate remote collaboration with the project’s European participants, these meetings gradually became less functional and more experiential as new pathways to collaboration, and a new understanding of the “real”, unfolded via the disconnected tools of the internet, at an unprecedented historical moment, while confined to domestic spaces across different cities and time zones - the sensations of “rehearsing” during lockdown becoming the experience of the work itself. The culmination of this months-long exercise in remote collaboration, this 24-hour online gathering will speak to the boundless and all encompassing spaces that can manifest between human beings in the virtual realm.
With imagery, action-based score, sound, language, color, and time, the online iteration of patch the sky with 5 colored stones will dive simultaneously into the respective skills of each participant, freely associating within the specific approach of Chinese 5 Element Theory (and the correspondences between our organs, colors, sound, speech, time of day, emotions and direction in space) to open up a multi-layered contemplation on our collective states of being - which has been the basis of Faïn’s work for more than 35 years.
All of these materials - original films, documentation of the communal gathering, and a host of contextual materials - will be made freely available to the public, and archived in perpetuity, within an interactive online platform to be launched on December 7, 2020; inviting the spectator to join in the effort to conjure an experience of human intimacy using tools of disconnection.
patch the sky with 5 colored stones is instigated by Daria Faïn in collaboration with Anaïs Maviel, vocalist/instrumentalist/composer (France / USA), Athena Kokoronis, artist (USA), Christian Konrad Schröder, composer/musician (Austria), David Thomson, performer (USA), Melanie Maar, performer (Austria / USA), Robert Kocik, poet/architect (USA), Saúl Ulerio, performer and performance consultant (USA), Tuçe Yasak, lighting designer (Turkey / USA), Tuomas Laitinen, director/performer (Finland), Alex Romania, director of photography (USA), Alexis Convento, project manager (Germany / USA), Annie Wang, web developer (USA), LD DeArmon, technical director (USA), nb zhong, creative editor (USA), and Shana Crawford, assistant (USA).
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