Fractalicious!

How close can you get? How fast can you go?

Fractalicious! is both “intermedial” in that it blends various media co-relationally so that the media is mutually integral to the performance and “post-dramatic” insofar as it is non-text centered while at the same time text flows continuously forming a multidimensional affective infrastructure; it is presentational, ironic, sincere, and comedic, and features every design aspect working interdependently with comparable value. The performance combines five powerful components, a coalescing pastiche of characters, subject positions, performance modes, and digital technologies: 1) an actor plays a professor’s multiple co-existing sensibilities that cascade in a chaotic unraveling and reorganizing of a stylized, often parodic, lecture, 2) a dancer/actor plays multiple subjectivities and affects competing for the space of the professor for whom she is lover, sadist, and symbiotic (altogether they present several overlapping storylines), 3) a number of actors, opera singers, or others sonically punctuate and amplify the fracturings of consciousness and subjectivity as they breakdown and renew throughout the performance, 4) a number of fully-integrated, reflexive-expansive videos permuting extreme phenomena from neurochemical to astronomical, human to machinic, horrific to beautiful, and so on, comprise, complicate and enhance the landscape and 5) a DJ weaves symphonically various sonic lifelines, biorhythmically fusing audience with all performance elements.

The creative team for this production is comprised of an extraordinary ensemble of artists from various disciplines and nationalities, including visual and performing arts (Netherlands, USA), modern dance (Netherlands, USA, UK), opera (Austria), music video-making (USA), sonic arts (Czech Republic, Spain), and theater-making (Netherlands, USA). With Fractalicious! we adventure the depths of “intimacy” to explore the question: “How does speed, scale, and proximity influence value, desire, and feeling?” Instead of answering the question in a way that might be understood cognitively, we want to inspire the audience to experience/embody the answer or answers. Fractalicious! hopes to precipitate what could be called “pure affects” rather than an experience that the audience can process logically, reasonably, or pragmatically. It does this through extravagant execution of a series of performative disjunctive syntheses accomplished through the blending and multifaceted articulating of diverse media combined with metatheatrics as well as surprise turnabouts and fracturings of modal, narrative, and consciousness streams. Our intention is to create an unforgettable “unexperienceable experience” – one that is “unforgettable” and “unexperienceable” because it exceeds common approaches to “making sense” of a theater performance or any event. Rather than inviting the audience to process and comprehend cognitively using conventional methods and logics by which to distill interpretively an event, the idea is to ignite and fuel the audience’s embodiment “viscerallectrically” (viscerally, intellectually, and electrically with mounting intensity) and then, as the performance culminates exponentially, “fractalactically” (with meaning and subjectivity simultaneously exploding and coming together without resolve), the concepts and affects expressed through the performance event. Presto, boom, shazam: one goes fractalicious!

The performance is 65 minutes.

The Team (United States Performances)

Written by Bryan Reynolds
Director of Performance: Guy Zimmerman
Director of Film: Michael Moshe Dahan
Choreographers: Kayla Emerson & Sheron Wray
Producer: Oscar Seip
Associate Producer: Sam Kolodezh
Stage Managers: Lauren McCue, Annie Jenkins
Lighting Designers: Lonnie Alcaraz (primary), Stacy McKenney
Sound Designer: David Bačkovský
DJ: David Bačkovský
Scenic Designer: Luke Cantarella
Costume Designer: Bryan Reynolds
Production Assistance: Miguel Grilo, Daniel Keegan, Adam Bryx
Film Editors: Joseph Melita, Eric Russ, Fabien Fievet, Aimee Murillo, Kevin Klauber
Green Screen Work: Joseph Melita

Cast:
Bryan Reynolds: PROFESSOR REYNOLDS
Kayla Emerson: KAYLA
Stephanie Draude, Special Guest: PRESENCE

Upcoming Performances:
Beall Center for Art + Technology: 16th, 17th & 18th of January 2013
University of California, Irvine xMPL Theater: 18th & 20th April 2013
UCLA, Royce Hall Lecture Theater 314, May 30th

Trailers:
Fractalicious! trailer 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Pkm0oSt1lY
Fractalicious! trailer 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHkQ2hfFhRg

Website:
http://www.fractalicious.eu/