Big Bangs & Black Holes
A Digital Double-Bill
Artistic direction, text, performance, edit: Chris Gylee & Aslan
Composition Dogs of Love: Elie Gregory
Sound Design We Come With Nothing: Mars Dietz
Light design: Elliott Cennetoglu
Photography: Óscar González
Production management: ehrliche arbeit — freies Kulturbüro
Supported by: the Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the framework of NEUSTART KULTUR. Kindly supported by Mustarinda Residency.
Composition Dogs of Love: Elie Gregory
Sound Design We Come With Nothing: Mars Dietz
Light design: Elliott Cennetoglu
Photography: Óscar González
Production management: ehrliche arbeit — freies Kulturbüro
Supported by: the Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the framework of NEUSTART KULTUR. Kindly supported by Mustarinda Residency.
We will use a #TakeHeart revivals grant to artistically and formally rework two stageworks — Dogs of Love and We Come With Nothing — as a digital double-bill of performance films to be streamed in summer 2023 on the Ballhaus Ost website.
Dogs of Love premiered at Ballhaus Ost (May 2019) and was selected for the cancelled 2020 Performing Arts Festival, Berlin. We Come With Nothing was developed with the help of a modest grant from Theater neben dem Turm, Marburg, and only shown to audiences as a work-in-progress in an adapted edition of their FÜR DICH, FÜR DICH, FÜR DICH festival (August 2021). Conceived as thematic partners, the artistic life of both works was shortened by the COVID pandemic, and the pieces have never been shown side-by-side.
We choose to reimagine the works as performance films in order to give these physically challenging pieces a longer life in a performance landscape of crowded schedules and priorities oriented toward new works. The films can also be shown in film festivals and in gallery / museum settings.
Revisiting these works will allow us to close the circle of our artistic inquiry. The pieces complete one other thematically — where Dogs of Love investigates commitment and endurance in Queer love, We Come With Nothing explores estrangement and letting go. Rather than filming the original stage set-ups, we will shoot on location, capturing poetic imagery that animates the themes of the works to create watchable and compelling films that are suited to on-screen viewing.
The above images include photography of the Finsch crater in Mare Serenitatis, the moon, by NASA, and View of bushes by Tudor Washington Collins (1930).
Big Bangs & Black Holes is a ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS production in cooperation with Ballhaus Ost. Kindly supported by Mustarinda Residency.
Additional thanks to: the team at Ballhaus Ost; Katelyn Stiles; the team at Theater neben dem Turm, Marburg.
Big Bangs & Black Holes is a ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS production in cooperation with Ballhaus Ost. Kindly supported by Mustarinda Residency.
Additional thanks to: the team at Ballhaus Ost; Katelyn Stiles; the team at Theater neben dem Turm, Marburg.