Prosodic body

Landing Sites

“Landing Sites” is a performance commissioned for a 2020 premiere by the Chocolate Factory in New York City. It is an inquiry into experiences of reality and their consequences in our lives. It will look at the immediate and long-term effects that our perceptions of reality have on the way we produce meaning, belief systems, and changes on environment.

The piece is inspired by the writings of Helen Keller, an iconic figure in 20th century America, who was blind and deaf and a fervent activist for women’s and disabled people’s rights. It aims to zoom in and out between the intimate dynamic of one’s inner experience and the collective principles through which one’s experience develops into belief systems.

Choreographer Daria Fain will be 60 years old in 2020, and she feels she is at the end of a cycle. “Landing Sites” grows out of her need to manifest on an intimate scale her 30 years of research in somatic practice, social art experiments, and performance craft.

In the residency, Fain, Kocik, Laitinen and Konrad will engage in hands-on exploration of historical facts, interpersonal dynamics, and the subtlest sensory perceptions, and dialogue through action, movement, speech, text, architectural/material space, sound, and light.

The title “Landing Sites” alludes to the way reality lands as fragmented perceptions, one’s own experience of reality, as relative rather than absolute. Some cultures see the sun as masculine, and others, as feminine. It’s interesting to contemplate how each belief creates a different experience through thought process and action. As THEA in ancient Greek translates in TO SEE, theater becomes an “instrument of observation”. This can be a tool for transformation and hopefully liberation.