Sadie, the Saddest Sadist, Mary Reid Kelley
THE THEATRE AND ITS TROUBLE
Thursday May 27, 7:00pm, 110min
A look into the Theater and Its Trouble reveals an excavation of high culture from the rubble of its irrelevance. The decay of imperial decadence is looted and pillaged: the soliloquy of an extinct esthete is remixed into a dance club anthem and the baroque body is resurrected in a second life séance. Effigies of false shadows are sacrificed and a new generation of shadows emerges to brutalize our grandeur and dismantle this masquerade. Regal totems, romantic verses and velvet draperies are reclaimed by western media artists’, as ammunition against the idolatry and opulence of late capitalism. We inhabit an age that will create no more masterpieces.
The ironic wordplay of Mary Reid Kelley twists the tongue of women in wartime, Sydney Vermont channels King Ludwig II of Bavaria through literary Drag and Elodie Pong introduces Marilyn to Marx at the fall of Capital. Kevin Clancy strains the tension of classical composition for piano via typewriter, while Rä di Martino undermines the scripted melodrama and lavish gestures of Opera. Alex Hetherington conducts a postproduction mash-up of Sarah Winchester, the sea shanty Shallow Brown, and email scams in a re-enactment of Catherine Sullivan’s Triangle of Need.
Mary Reid Kelley, Queen’s English | 2008 | 4min | DV | USA
Elodie Pong, After The Empire | 2008 | 14min | HD | Switzerland
Sydney Vermont, Ludwig | 2010 | 12min | DV | Canada
Kevin Clancy, Babel | 2010 | 20min | Sound Performance| USA
Mary Reid Kelley, Sadie the Saddest Sadist | 2009 | 7min | DV | USA
Rä di Martino, August 2008 | 2009 | 5min | DV | Belgium
Intermission | 15min
Alex Hetherington, A Million Lies Once and Only Revealed After Death (Triangle of Need) | 2009 | 33min | 3 Channel DV | UK/US
