The clean room—the actual place (the dust free environment used for the production of sensitive technologies)—becomes a metaphor for the subtle evolution of our lives (for better or worse) due to the encroachments of technology.
The audience entering the theater is confronted by figures (who are, it turns out, the performers) dressed in modified “clean room” garb “sanitizing” the room so the performance can begin. The huge curtain of projected images is then peeled back to reveal the stage, the cleaning tools are discarded and the onstage performers take their places in costumes made of recycled old media.
In this concert these questions unfold:
Are you informed about information?
It’s 10 o’clock. Do you know where your information is? Where does it go when you send it out. Is information stable? Are you relying on technology that will become obsolete before you do?
Is the image based culture we are creating numbing our senses?
Are we replacing our ability to sense things through, touch, smell, taste and feeling with the transfer of bits to a screen?
Where is the “digisphere” and who lives there?
Are we living in a world where, as Gertrude Stein put it, “there isn’t any there there”? Is that you—or your “avatar”?
And the ultimate question, will we be better off as we migrate towards the “digisphere”?
Don’t know. Perhaps you will form an answer of your own after seeing this concert.
Produced and directed by Katie Elliott and Jim LaVita
Cast includes: Joshua Fink, Jennifer Golonka, Samantha Harvey, Lara Hayes-Giles, Danielle Hendricks, Gina Jacobs-Thomas, Eliza Kuelthau, Michael Richman, Tara Rynders, Olivia Silverthorne, and Angie Simmons. Lighting design by Craig A. Bushman.