Award-winning performance companies ArtSpot Productions and Mondo Bizarro present FLIGHT, a new ensemble-generated performance extravaganza featuring performer-activated machines, film projection, song and live theatre. FLIGHT explores humankind’s enduring dream of flight and the unpredictable consequences of our ambitious pursuit of that dream. The brainchild of award-winning sculptor and set designer Jeff Becker, FLIGHT’s stunning visuals, live music and dazzling physical performances merge to create a fantasia that invites audiences to consider the ways in which the phenomenon of flight has touched their lives, their cities, their countries and the world.
Our companies create multi-disciplinary work that is rooted in a particular sense of place, reflecting the needs, desires, memories and possibilities of the community from which it is born. We utilize physical theater techniques and extended rehearsal processes during which performers create individual scores from specific source material: text, song, biographical research, oral histories, and so on. Over the course of six to eighteen months, the performers refine their individual scores and inspire the writing, scenic relationships and songs that form the foundation of our work.
For FLIGHT, we challenged our usual process by placing the focus on the visual world; we devised the work through group improvisations based upon Jeff Becker’s visual concepts. We investigated various ways to physicalize poetically the dream, ambition, and consequences of flight. The directors, writers and designers refined their respective elements: machines, objects, text, song, physical scores, video collage and costumes. As a result, Jeff’s sculptures/set pieces and Courtney Egan‘s videoscape inform the performers’ actions, creating an atmosphere and a visual world that totally envelops the audience. (One industry colleague told us that FLIGHT is the most successful example of a truly multi-disciplinary performance piece she has ever witnessed, one in which all elements share an equal contribution and weight in the final work.)
Performer-activated machines become costumes, playing spaces, projection surfaces and flying devices. The visual environment continually transforms, evolving through the manipulation of machines, objects and video. Songs come and go, de- and re-constructed by a six-voice surround-sound choir. Shoes and suitcases take flight. Humans become birds, and the familiar action of removing your shoes at the airport security gate becomes a poetry of potential for escaping gravity.
FLIGHT premiered to enthralled audiences in New Orleans in May of 2008. FLIGHT has since been remounted in New Orleans for the 2008 New Orleans Fringe Festival, and in Tulsa, Oklahoma for the 2010 Living Arts Festival. For more information, please contact us.
