This interdisciplinary production explores our addiction to television with a team of 20 actors, musicians, technicians and aerial dancers. With no seating, audience members will wade through a transformed theater space waist-deep in balloons, immersed in thousands of animated TV images projected on four walls.
Actors will interact with audiences as musicians appear and perform seemingly out of nowhere. With a rich mix of aerial dancers, actors, live music and thousands of moving images and balloons, there could be moments of sensory overload, overwhelm and laughter.
The production was conceived and produced by Hunter Ewen, a CU doctoral candidate in music and Nicole Predki of Frequent Flyers (MFA Dance 2009).
Taking place January 26th and 27th 2012, at the ATLAS Black Box Theater in Boulder, CO, I Am Watch Television Zombie is an exploration of the nature of our mutual addiction to the television screen. With an all volunteer team of over 40 actors, dancers, musicians, technologists, videographers, welders, chefs, computer-programmers, and balloon inflaters, the show will be an unrelenting assault on the eyes, ears, and taste buds of the audience. Instead of sitting in chairs, the audience will be directed by invisible voices in the concert hall to stand and move throughout the 2,400 sqft performance space. Audience members will wade, waist-deep, in a sea of balloons that fill the entire hall as projections flash all around them and aerial dancers take to the sky on custom-built contraptions above everyone's heads!
Throughout the performance, people will be completely surrounded by moving images projected onto a 360 degree, wrap-around screen. We will be projecting 58 hours of television (the average amount a person watches in a week) during each performance. Musicians will emerge from nooks and crannies in the space and play along with the BOOMING 13.1 surround-sound system while mingling with the audience. We even have a mechanically controlled grand-piano ready to do our bidding! The wails and cries of the actors will be reflected, projected, and transformed by a suite of custom-built computer applications to form the terrifying roar of the zombie apocalypse.
What we have:
This project was the winner of the 2011 ATLAS Arts and Technology Fellowship, and as such, much of the technical support will be provided freely by the ATLAS Center for Arts, Media, and Performance. This includes use of projectors, computers, audio equipment, lighting design, audio and video recording equipment, as well as an excellent support team to help make sure everything behind-the-scenes runs the way we want. The black box theaterat The University of Colorado Boulder, is quite possibly the most technologically advanced performance venue of it's size in Colorado, and it is a great honor to be producing the show alongside their team.
We are also blessed with an incredibly passionate and creative group of on and off-stage performers. The team of aerialists are volunteers from Colorado's pre-eminent aerial dance and theater company, and the musicians and performance artists are all volunteers from the Boulder and Denver areas. We have the passion, drive, and experience to make this project a great success. We have all been involved in large-scale performances, and we're raring to go. And with YOUR help, this project will be bigger, better, badder, and bolder than anything we've done before!
What we need:
Volunteer performers are the backbone of this project, but we're still a long way from financing our endeavor! We need money for costumes, set design, props, welding of aerial dance equipment, software, and wires and cables to make the fleet of projectors and computers work. We need wood, canvas, and paint for the scenery. We need metal to build rigs for the dancers and to build percussion instruments for performers. We want to build special rigs for the performers to hide in, emerge from, and be flown to the ceiling as they explore every inch of the space, horizontally and vertically. We need money for exotic and spine-tingling foods to entice the audience. We need money to buy and fill the entire performance space will balloons (and if we're lucky, we'll set a Guinness Record doing so). We will need safety equipment for the aerial performers: harnesses, ropes, fabric, and pulleys. It's a tall order, but a little bit of money goes along way (especially since we're all volunteering our time)!
We also need people who can become involved creatively in the project! Our reward system is setup such that everyone who donates becomes involved in the show. Not only will you get some epic loot (not available to the public), but we want images and videos FROM YOU - things you think would be appropriate for our show. So we're asking everyone who donates to send us names, pictures, and/or videos. It could be you and your friends posing like zombies - it could be you making a crazy face, or dressed up as your favorite TV/movie/internet character - it could be a great drawing you make or even something completely unrelated! We want everyone to feel like they have astake in the project, so the wackier, crazier, and more unusual your pictures / videos, the better! We're looking forward to seeing what awesome stuff everyone comes up with!
