Curious Sensory Encounters Program

Created by Julie Krzypek

In a world where our senses are bombarded by stimuli fighting for our attention, dead sea  is a conceptual piece conveying war through the lens of “strangers” meeting for the first time. dead sea studies the alchemy of physical touch transforming into inner feelings while examining whether context, environment, familiarity and conceptions of our own free will provoke our behavior and whether war is a choice or a consequence of our repeated daily behaviors.

DUNK HER! DUNK HER! 

DO IT! 

IT’S FUNN!!

La Donna Williams – Creator, “Queen”

Sharlene Sanders – “Spirit”

Kayla Bryant – “Candy Lady”

How do we experience joy amid uncertainty? As a Black woman in America, my body has always been a battleground. Historically, my ancestors had to make the best of what they were given. We’ve resisted in many ways, instilling hope in our communities. This piece embodies this courage and breathes new life into what it means to be a freedom fighter by centering the joy and the release that must come to continue in hope. When we are standing in the rubble of our lives, may we always return to ourselves.

Aileen Loy – Head Librarian, Founder of Little Free Contentious Library

Kayla Bryant – Librarian of Black Woman Joy, The Candy Lady

Nitzia Ramos – Librarian of the Java Lords patio, the Cigar ASL Lady

Theresa Davis, Lauren Vogelbaum,  Mike Katinsky,  Skyeris, and La Donna – Librarians of all Senses

After the bombing and eventual occupation of the village, there was much to do about how to rebuild some semblance of a market square that could serve as a hub for the distribution of food, rations, medicine, and information.  Naturally, because of their keen organizational skills, this task was left to the town Librarians; rather quickly, they went to work and set about creating a makeshift quartermaster’s station inside the bombed out remains of the library on High Street. 

The occupied army relinquished the use of a dozen or so tents to be utilized as storefronts.  This was granted with great reluctance, after they lost an epic staring contest with the Librarian’s champion, Skyeris. While Librarians Theresa and Mike’s commentary will forever be etched in the archives of ASL held in trust by Librarian Nitzia, no one is quite sure who suggested the contest. What is known is that the commander’s champion, a 12 yr old with hypertension that the troops affectionately called “The Eyeball Kid,” was bribed with a treat to throw the contest by Candy Lady, the Librarian with a sweet and  spicy nack for protest. 

With the establishment of the new High Street in the village of SEVEN, The Librarians found themselves with a few tents leftover.  Deliberation over their use ran the spectrum from highly practical tool sharpening station, to cathartically impractical dish smashing salon.  In the end, the need for distraction won out and the tents were made into an immersive installation.  Each tent was dedicated to one of the 5 senses, with a mysterious 6th sense added at the urging of Librarian Lauren, who had a penchant for all things slightly spooky. Under their curation, each tent would house a single encounter dedicated to one of the senses, created by someone in the village.  Some were grand, some very simple.  They rotated out on a weekly basis, with the hopes that eventually, almost everyone in the town would have a chance to say what they needed to say.

This week on High Street: Head Librarian Aileen Loy and rotating Librarians recite the banned word while enticing YOU to listen in the confessional, touch the animals, read the fine print, taste the candy, take in a burnt offering, learn a language, and/or find your 6th sense with a prediction for our collective future.

Georgia Public Broadcasting and Indie Lens Pop Up

Amanda Densmore – GPB Producer

Emmalee Hackshaw – GPB Producer

Alison O’Daniel – Director of The Tuba Thieves

Su Kim, Maya E Rudolph, Rachel Nederveld – Additional Filmmakers

What is the role of sound and what does it mean to listen? Hard of hearing filmmaker Alison O’Daniel uses a series of tuba thefts in Los Angeles high schools as a jumping-off point to explore these questions in her film The Tuba Thieves.  As O’Daniel notes, “Ultimately, this film is a meditation on access and loss and an investigation into what it means to steal, make, lose, own, protest against, and legislate sound and, therefore, inversely, quiet and peace.”  We would like the audience to consider the nature of sound itself when watching clips from the film.  

We invite you to blow up a balloon and hold it while you watch the film clips. Feel the detail of the sound design, music and soundtracks move across the surface.

Balloons are an easy, practical way to access the soundtrack of the film through vibration. Historically, Deaf folks gathered in Deaf clubs to watch movies. They held balloons to feel the sound vibrations.  Balloons are not an alternative to accessible captions. We are using them to draw attention to the creativity and ingenuity of Disabled audiences.

The Tuba Thieves invites its audiences into deeper discussions about sound, sight, sensory translation, and subjective perception. As such, it is not a film exclusively “about” deafness. It is also not solely “about” the experiences of the d/Deaf community. Audience members—whether they are d/Deaf, hearing, hard of hearing, disabled, nondisabled, or anything else—will all have their own perspectives to share about the world of the film.

Zoey Laird, Tatiana Bell, Michael Czajkowski – Organizers/Artists

“We Keep Us Safe” invites audiences to engage with various forms of loss through the recreation of a space that was designed to hold and amplify our collective grief. Its original container was a greenhouse containing collaborative art installations, community offerings, and a curated zine collection, serving as a meditative space to grieve, learn, rest, and care for each other. Through this experience, participants are immersed in fragments of the previous installation, the words shared, and memories of the movement, while invited to become part of the installation by sharing their own offerings of grief and solidarity.

Celeste Miller – Co-creator, Performer, Host

Dana Lupton – Co-creator, Performer

Deisha Oliver – Co-creator, Musician

Charne Fulcron – Co-creator, Performer

A series of playful, interactive guided movement meditations playing with light and shadow.

How can embodied experiences of light be opened to multi sensorial experiences? What can we learn about the human condition, our humanity, our human connections, by allowing ourselves to be sensorially present in community with others at play with light and shadow?

Shady Radical – Performance Archivist

Lauren Neefe – Sound Architect

Windy Oya Radical – The STAR

F(L)IGHT puts audiences in conversation with Deaf Republic and the hearing-impaired community, by showing us how processes of remembering and forgetting, like deafness, can be considered acts of resistance. Interpreter, Billy Sanders considers signing as his “mother tongue” as a hearing child born to a deaf mother, while Ilya Kominsky illustrates how deafness can constitute protest.  If fight or flight are our body’s automatic responses to threat, and we accept that the enslaved always resisted as argued by The Black Radical Tradition, how does the role of the mother, mothering, and mother tongue function or fail as stewards of remembering or forgetting in our bodies/in our archives?  How are we taught to remember or what are we taught to forget in order to survive?  How does mothering govern what we know, remember, and how we respond?

This work digs deeper into the archives of Pearl Cleage and the history of her work at 7 Stages theatre. Cleage and her stories are conceived as a literary mothering figure in the work.  Through movement, sound, archival material and textiles Dr. shady Radical,  Lauren Neefe, and windy Oya Radical present a 1-act production in the Main Stage Dressing Room. This work draws from the work of Black memory workers Holly Smith, Tonia Sutherland, Zakiya Collier, movement scholar Julie Johnson, as well as afrofuturist thinkers Adrienne Brown and Aku Kadogo.

Mark Kendall – Director, Actor

Madeline Evans – Actor

Marietta Mendler – Actor

Sam Aluyon – Musician

A fun-filled improv show where everything goes according to plan and nothing ever goes wrong!

This performance is about using comedy as a tool to find joy in the face of obstacles.

Cori Williams – Artist

The newspaper has lost its angles, the bread has been squished, and the snow has collected dust. They have fulfilled their roles as props- the objects that give meaning to the actions shown on stage. They are gathered and reset for each performance, while little clues hint at the story they are telling. The egg comes back cracked, the apple with a bite taken out, and the puppet reappears with red circles drawn around its eyes.

The audience is watching them come and go, unaware of the story and connections that bind these objects together. A timeline is created throughout the run. Marks made, dents left, consumables tossed. No two performances can be identical; time and a human are involved. The small changes add up. Perhaps not noticeable from the night before, but from the first show to the last they have each transformed in their own ways, and now they can rest once more and wait to be used again. The dust gathers. 

Petar Miloshevski – Writer, Director, Performer

The Exalting Dreams of the Wondrous Foul is a site-specific physical theatre solo-performance, reflecting on the story of an individual left on the margins. Featuring The Foul: a character of an incredibly ambiguous nature, a person dressed in what looks like rags – but very deliberately chosen rags, beautifully crafted and stylized – as if the person is about to go to the opera house. In the eyes of “ordinary people”, though, the mismatched laces, divine silks, beautiful skirts, astonishing pearls, dashing wigs, will amount to little more than Filth. A character of an androgynous appearance, brooding amongst the crowd, telling a story of abandoned dreams, failed ambitions, solitude – yet so many hopes awaiting realization. 

The Foul is also pregnant – a dual symbol of the heavy burden the character carries at all times, but also of potential: of something which grows inside and will be the most beautiful product, the most fascinating idea, born for a better future, for a greater tomorrow. 

This is a performance tackling topics of gender, sexuality, societal abandonment, loneliness. It explores the sense of SIGHT: The Foul represents the people we constantly avoid, pretending we don’t notice, walking past them, deliberately ignoring them, the countless characters we stumble into every single day. Yet how many times do we ask ourselves what is the real story of each one of these potentially incredible characters. 

This piece aims to incarnate, bring to life, and give a voice to people who suffer in silence because of their identity, background, inability to find the platform or a voice. Although it primarily speaks to the sense of Sight, it also indirectly references the other senses: this is a piece about the person our societies have consciously declared War against – and the primary weapon of this war is the numbing of our senses: we don’t want to see them, we don’t want to smell them, we never want to hear from them, let alone touching them or being touched by them. 

This is not a tragic story. The performance gives hope, gives light, gives a voice as well as purpose and a striking story to all those whom society considers as lacking personal integrity, purpose or vocation.