SLAVES

SLAVES

Book and music by Sunder Ganglani.
With Adina Verson, Chris Henry, Jillian Taylor 
Additional text by Paul Celan and Ariana Reines 
Additional music by Ben Sharony 

September 15th at 8pm September 16th and 17th at 8 and 11 pm.
Buy Tickets

SLAVES is a piece of music for three actors - each of which is a slave to the other. The three of them are put to work in the theater, for us, for now at least. Their bodies aren't their own, made up as they are of the desires and intentions of those who own them, and it's unclear whether or not their feelings are their own either. They wait, they hope, they sing, they imagine what their lives will become once they are returned to themselves, and they dance. They remind each other over and over again that it is a gift to able to look at any living thing and say to it "where have you been?"

In other words SLAVES is about the ways in which a person fails at communicating the contents of their heart and suffers the consequences of that failure. It was inspired originally by a movement from one of Beethoven's late quartets (see below), and the epigraph to the poet Claudia Rankine's book Don't Let Me Be Lonely, a well known quote by the poet Aime Cesaire which reads:

Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, because life is not a spectacle, because a sea of sorrows is not a proscenium, because a man who cries out is not a dancing bear

It's also a response to Seneca - who did make spectacle of suffering. 

But it's also a love letter to the popstar Robyn and her song "Call Your Girlfriend," and its accompanying video, which we hope you'll watch, which we can't stop watching, and which we decided early on in the process was the kind of feeling we hoped we could communicate in the basement at 217 Park Street. 

SLAVES is also a hypothtical provocation: what happens to a person's feelings when the world they live in seems incapable to engage them as they are, without attempting to transform them into what might be easier to understand but irrelevant. Or, in other words - what if Freud never convinced the world that represession and the neurotic self was what becomes of incommunicable feelings? What if there was an alternative.

SLAVES is also, for lack of a better word - a "musical."  

Here's the Beethoven:

And some photos and a video of the early experiments we've been doing in making costumes for two of the three, which we're hoping will be as inexplicable and alarming as we've imagined them to be: