Coil 2017: Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster
“Gunn’s text is intricate and often brilliant, full of unpredictable digressions and curious factoids. It’s the verbal equivalent of skimming stones over water.” – Cameron Woodhead, The Age (AU)
Nicola Gunn (Australia)
Theater, Dance | US Premiere
Co-presented with La MaMa
Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster is the story of a man, a woman and a duck. The work is disarmingly simple – exploring in depth the moral conundrum of what one should do if one comes across a person throwing rocks at a sitting duck – but gradually becomes mind-bendingly complex. Accompanying the text is a rhythmic electronic soundscape and intense physical choreography shifting from the unnecessary and incongruous to the comic and strangely affecting. Gunn brings into question your own intervention ethics with a confrontational muse on peace and conflict, moral relativism, and the very function of art.
See the full COIL line-up, including shows outside La MaMa go to: ps122.org/coil
Nicola Gunn is a Melbourne-based performer, writer, director and dramaturge. Since 2002, she has been making works that blend performance, art and anthropology to explore the fragility of the human condition with subversive humor. Her artistic practice is committed to institutional critique, social engagement and generating works that activate the public sphere by questioning old ways of being or proposing new ones. She uses performance to reflect critically on its place in theatres, to examine power relations in existing organizations and to consider the relevance and social function of art itself. The starting process is often a written text or idea imagined responding to a self-generated impulse to tell a story or explore a form. She draws mainly from her experience to create autobiographical fiction. Nicola’s work has been presented widely in Australia and has toured to Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United States.