Contact Facing West Shadows Artistic Director, Lydia Greer directly: lydiakgreer@gmail.com
Facing West Shadows: Phantasmagoria
Kanbar Forum, The Exploratorium
Thursday, July 28th, 2022 • 8:00 p.m. Saturday, July 30, 2022 • 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m.
Sunday, July 31, 2022 • 2:00 p.m.
JULY 28th Tickets: AFTER DARK (one evening performance), Thursday, July 28th Purchase tickets here for AFTER DARK: https://www.exploratorium.edu/visit/calendar/after-dark-shine
JULY 30th & 31st Tickets: Saturday July 30th (two daytime performances) and Sunday July 31st (one daytime performance) Purchase tickets here for the 30th & 31st: https://www.exploratorium.edu/visit/calendar/facing-west-shadows-phantasmagoria
Join us for the premiere of Facing West Shadows: Phantasmagoria. Performed by the Bay Area collective Facing West Shadows, the work is a live, multimedia, shadow-theater opera inspired by the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “The Robber Bridegroom.” It incorporates puppetry and shadow play, video projection, stop-motion animation, and live music. Ethereal operatic voice, piano, and clarinet merge with a phantasmagoria of shadows to tell a story about resilience and the power of truth. The premiere brings together two ancient art forms: fairy tales, many of which predate literary records, and shadow puppetry, which uses allegory, drama, music, and the beauty of shadows to tell stories. Ancestors, animals, ecosystems, and communities comprise networks of resistance across space and time in this spellbinding work.
Facing West Shadows: Phantasmagoria was led by Artistic Director Lydia Greer and Theatrical Director Caryl Kientz in collaboration with puppeteer Fred C. Riley III and artist Yawen Chien with musicians, William Sauerland, countertenor, Kylie Stultz-Dessent, clarinet and Andrew Nesler, piano.
Facing West Shadows is a collective of artists, puppeteers, filmmakers, and musicians hybridizing art forms to create magical acts of rebellion as experimental art. Expanding into film, theater, and installation, Facing West Shadows creates surprising experiences for the audience by seamlessly combining old and new technologies and art forms.
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Facing West Shadows: The Endless End
David Pace Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Art San José
On View:
April 1 – August 2022
Facing West Shadows: The Endless End is a cinematic, sculptural installation created by Facing West Shadows at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José. Facing West Shadows: The Endless End illuminates the perpetuation of extinction and survival; the disrupted life cycles of native plants and animals, aquatic systems, and fire ecologies as affected by anthropogenic climate change. The viewer’s attention is guided through projected moving images, hand-made animation, and cast shadows with a multi-dimensional soundscape. Collapsing and expanding time, species will live and die over the span of an hour of looping, overlapping, multichannel and multidirectional projection. In a sculptural environment, our role as animals within a system and as the planet’s apex predator is illuminated.
Image above:
Facing West Shadows, The Endless End, 2021, paper sculpture, cast shadows, multiple projections of hand-made stop-motion animation (ink and graphite on yupo, collage, cut paper, found objects and silhouette animation) shadow puppetry and found footage, 30 x 20 ft (variable). Courtesy of the Artists. Photo: Lauren Tabak.
