The Event

I collaborated with Peggy Piacenza, as Creative collaborator and Costume Designer. 

“We’re born, we live, we die.”

It’s a cliché and a profound truth. But does it really cover everything? In Peggy Piacenza’s new evening-length dance piece, The Event, how we fill the space between birth and death is the jumping-off point for a look at what’s beyond those ultimate markers of existence: the subconscious, timeless spaces between death and rebirth that sometimes seem to hover over our lives.

Probing our experience of time and timelessness, The Event considers elements of the human condition: humor, fantasy, mortality and sorrow explored within a hybrid of dance, theater, text, and film. The Event is a collection of visual and thematic contrasts: meditation and pain, beauty and suffering, ethereality and showiness, stillness and motion all work in dynamic counterbalance. Within a surreal set swirling with pink cotton candy, athletic dancing makes an emphatically human stamp.Quoting Lars Von Trier’s film, Antichrist, anxiety disrupts reflection as a performer insists, “Can’t you hold me? I feel rotten!” Later, Piacenza studies hidden contradictions in the simple, repeated phrase, “I’m just standing here.” The piece casts light on the human struggle for meaning in absurdity and the urge of the soul to purge what weighs it down.

 

Client: Peggy Piacenza
Services Provided: Creative Collaboration | Costume Design
Photo credits: Jeff Gardiner

Watch the Trailer 

Nothing compares to being present in the moment for experiencing art. This trailer on Vimeo provides a glimpse of ‘The Event’ experience.

Visual Samples of The Event