vitreous bodies

An original performance work

April 2 and April 5, 8pm, in the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, 149 W Hastings Street, as part of Live Acts 2024

Vitreous Bodies grew through a process weaving between filmmaking and devised theatre, with each informing the other along the way, and emerged as an ethereal, goopy experiment in expanded cinema — a performance built around the fragments of a cult horror film. It considers screens as sites for fluid states of being, asking how the images we see change us, the way we see ourselves, and the way we relate to the people around us.  What does it mean to see yourself in a work of art? To remake yourself in its image? Vitreous Bodies negotiates the simultaneous desires to embrace and transcend the material; to be seen and to disappear. Through re-enactment, replay, and ritual, three devotees of a queer cult classic find and lose themselves as the worlds of the real and fictional bleed into each other. Bodies on stage mirror bodies on screen. Slime drips under candy-coloured light. 

This work is entangled with the work of other artists and thinkers and is indebted to too many people to comprehensively name. Here is an abbreviated, inadequate list of guiding lights: the films of Cheryl Dunye, Gregg Araki, Jane Schoenbrun, David Cronenberg, Dario Argento, and Mike Mills; the writings of Eliza Steinbock, Hazel Jane Plante, Jericho Brown, and Anne Carson; and the video-based work of Jeremy Shaw.

Credits:

Lead Artist: Lauren Han 

Performers: Sara van Gaalen (Lydia), Indah Del Bianco (Molly), Saskia "Skye" Cseh (Angel)

Stage Manager: Claire Jia 

LX Design/TD: Siqi Xu 

Operators: Xinyi Wang & Mars Menezes 

Film Cast: Bronwyn Rees (Iris), Jodie Soo (Suzy), & Squidthread (the Butcher)

Film Crew: Jasmine Bedingfield (DP), Lauren Toporowski (Camera Operator), Angie Yu (Sound Tech), Bernice Paet (Gaffer/Clapper), Aisha Wewala (AD), Marita Michaelis (Production Design), & Rosemary Morrison (Wardrobe) 

Sound: ?NUMB?DAME?, Indah Del Bianco

Special thanks to RJ and Nico at Video Cat, Corbin Saleken, Rosemary Morrison, Avery Chapman, Clare Noble, Justin Perdomo, Miwa Matreyek, Nadia Shihab, Erika Latta, Ryan Tacata, Caroline Liffman, and the 2023/24 Capstone class.

Photos by Colleen Bayati and Siqi (Suki) Xu