Enceladus Below
Matthew Toffoletto's MFA Defence
Room 4955 (Mini Cinema) Tuesday, March 7, 2023 | 9:30 AM
間眅埶AV Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Enceladus Below, objects and performers come together on stage to shape and reshape a blurry view of home and memory. By drawing on fiction, faint views of history, and fragments of personal memory, three performers helped to flesh out a fragmentary script about objects and afterlife. Nine devised rituals, drawn from everyday acts of touch and gesture, were imposed on top of textual fragments of dialogue and action, and the resulting scenes were built on unresolved collisions between these two separate structures. The two hour performance was paralleled by acousmatic sound and layered moving image projections. The sound was drawn from close recordings of metal and ceramic objects. The projections were assembled from layered footage devised throughout the process. The underlying creative method touched on the opaque concepts of history and archeology rendered in relationship to objects and to notions of touch, gesture, and spectrality.