Event

Paper Cities

Paper Cities or, Strategies to Avert the Coming Megalopolis, is a fragmented survey of western civilization and imagined mythologies, narrated through puppetry, animated film, movement and sound. A sixty-minute multidisciplinary performance that asks how we've collectively created the current social, political, cultural and environmental situation in North America. Realizing there is a myriad of perspectives that make up this broad question, we aim to incite discussion rather than to proffer answers. The piece sniffs out colonial narratives subsumed and buried in personal genealogies, investigating what it means to loose ones home by force, eviction, or habitat destruction.

Bridget Rountree and Iain Gunn are Animal Cracker Conspiracy, a contemporary hybrid puppet company that pushes the boundaries of live kinetic performance. With support from the Jim Henson Foundation, the San Diego Foundation, Guthman Foundation and the La Jolla Playhouse they are producing Paper Cities a devised performance that draws from a multiplicity of contexts visual art, puppetry, theater, dance and literature. The heart of Paper Cities questions the precarious foundations and logic of which humans have constructed their own built environment. Bringing into question the very act of puppetry as a performative medium to explore what stories are being told and query who is manipulating who. Sound design by Kristopher Apple. Directed by Liam Clancy.