Performances will take place at The Chocolate Factory Theater, 38-33 24th Street, Long Island City.
View the show program.
VESSEL is a durational performance installation that is open to the public between 5pm and 8pm. Audience members can arrive anytime in-between and stay as long as they desire while it is open. We recommend you arrive by 7pm to more fully experience the installation, as it closes promptly at 8pm.
VESSEL continues David Thomson’s research into the perception of identity, and the ways in which presence and absence operate within the human experience. Within an intricate physical installation, Thomson and his collaborating performers – Jaguar Mary X, Katrina Reid, Katie Workum, Nehemoyia Young and Martita Abril – embody a physical practice developed specifically for the project, navigating pathways of transformation and altered states.
VESSEL is thematically influenced by post-colonialist writer Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relations, in which he explores the concept of opacity as the unquantifiable definition of ‘other’; questioning our ability to truly know another or even ourselves within the constructs of socio-political identity. Thomson and his collaborators translate these questions into the semiotics of the visual, asking: how can we subvert the relationship between audience and performer and the deeply habitual act of visual interpretation as truth…to reimagine the poetics of presence?
VESSEL emphasizes practice over performance, asking all involved to engage their senses and imaginations in the process of listening on different – and deeper – levels; embracing the unseen as a palpable state of possibility.
Created and performed by David Thomson with Jaguar Mary X, Katrina Reid, Katie Workum, Nehemoyia Young and Martita Abril. Visual Design by Peter Born and Athena Kokoronis. Sound Design by James Lo. Lighting Design by Stan Pressner. Production Stage Manager: Tricia Toliver.
“VESSEL: Seeing Double” – Noa Weiss and Nora Raine Thompson, The Brooklyn Rail
