meatS P A C E Theatre Company

Devisers' Note

MeatSPACE Theatre presents Mind The Lag, a multisensory performance piece that explores (dis)connection in the digital age, welcoming the dawning of a new era in theatre-making and performance techniques by blurring the origin of the live event.

Utilising international performance spaces and mediated images, a digital avatar is born out of cyberspace and into the meatspace. Can an ‘avatar’ achieve agency outside the computerised world? As the audience watches these avatars acquire ever more human processing power, will they escape the productivity the matrix demands, or will they discover agency to escape to the unknown?

New skin, new muscles, new limbs, a spine and a semi-functional digestive system are not the only things our avatars will discover as they explore captivity, consciousness, and connection.

Remember, stay true and be free. Meet you in the meatspace.

Above Video: a note on Composition from the Director

DOCUMENTATION of live encounter

Mind The Lag is a multisensory performance piece that explores (dis)connection in the digital age, welcoming the dawn of a new era in theatre-making and performance techniques by blurring the origin of the live event.  

Utilising international performance spaces and mediated images, a digital avatar is born out of cyberspace and into the meatspace. Can a digital avatar achieve agency outside the computerised world? As these avatars acquire ever more human processing power, are they able escape the productivity the matrix demands? Or can they acquire agency to escape to the unknown? 

Artists in Space.

Performing Research

Royal Central School of Speech and Drama MA Advanced Theatre Practice2021

Linda van Egmond, Laura Lounge, Antonietta Mazzei

Puppetry Exploration

by Jock Maitland and Laura Lounge

A practice as research query. Not a performance.

What is the moment of puppet inception? When the puppeteer imagines it? When the score is written? When the audience witnesses it? What is the audience’s role in this creative forming and world building of the puppet? How can score writing help enhance this audience engagement? Who’s manipulating whom? How can puppetry be used as an extension of the self, and a metaphor for collective consciousness?

Score collage by Jock Maitland, with collaborations listed (right). We invite you to pick one, and perhaps make a puppetry exploration of your own. Then invite others to interpret it through scoring the performance. Thus the creative chain moves on…

Below, a series of two minute puppets.

Prototype. Prototype. Prototype.

Above, a score drawn by Jock and devised by Jock and Laura. Interpretative puppetry exploration by Dominic Weatherby and Mari Katsuno.

I miss you.

I’ll meet you in the meat space.

In this fragment I explore the liveness of performance and lean into scenographic tools that arise from theatre’s liveness. We are in a time when a simulated reality dominates, and the blurred boundary of ‘what is theatre?’ moves drastically to the digital. In I miss you. I examine the elements of scenography that cannot be captured in playback. Eye contact. Physical Touch. Visual Noise. Movement. Olfactory. Aurality. The present moment.

Olfactory

Scent and Memory.

Olfactory is the largest memory receptor for the brain. In my research in trying to match a scent with emotion, the only constant was that it took each person on a journey to an emotion. I then used it as part of my scenographic toolbox as an abstract tool for narrative.

GROUNDING BLEND

Lemon
Frankincense
Vetiver
Spanish Rosemary
Neroli

Strawberry

I am interested in scent as a storytelling tool, and also as a punchline. I was curious if I could create a common vocabulary for my audience with scent, to the extent that it was a punchline of a joke. I realized our cluster had already made our own classroom culture around the term “strawberry”. It is our safe word for proximity, so I chose to close I miss you. with that scent.

Video Reflection

This is a compilation of unedited audio audience reflections. The video is an unedited excerpt from the performance. The video is not meant to capture the piece, but as documentation for the artist.

Audience Prompt: Because the main focus of this fragment is its ‘liveness’, please take a moment to video journal a reflection of any one of the meatspace elements.

Here are some reflections.

I miss you.

by Laura Lounge

a fragment as part of the ScenoGANG: Spectacular! Spectacular! Festival

Interdisciplinary Practices, Scenography cluster

MFA Advanced Theatre Practice

Royal Central School of Speech and Drama

Tutors: Dan Scott and Andreas Skourtis

Collaborators: Peiyu Huang and Antonietta Mazzei

Audience Reflection Contributors: Sophia Utria, Antonietta Mazzei, Lauren Stone-Symes, Kendra Miller, Dan Scott, Dana McMillian, Billie Harrison, Peiyu Huang, Gaurav Singh

R.U.R. / lol a devised work of The LIDA Project*

Part text. Part noise. Part sound. Part image. All Robot.

R.U.R./lol, an original work loosely based on the 1920 Czech science-fiction play Rossum’s Universal Robots. At the end of humanity four robots remain. Through their controllers they work to protect what remains of the planet from a catastrophic event. The process leads them to question how we came to this end.

The Company

Direction: Lorenzo Sariñana
Production Design: Steven J. Deidel
Lighting Design: Steven J. Deidel / Kenrick Fischer
Scenic Design: Steven J. Deidel / David Lafont
Sound Design: Dustin Lacy / Lorenzo Sariñana
Costume Design: Lorenzo Sariñana
Projection Design: Steven J. Deidel /Brian Freeland / David Lafont / Max Peterson

Ensemble
Robots: Rhea Amos / Hart DeRose / **Laura Lounge** / Heidi Pachner
Controllers: Kenrick Fisher / Brian Freeland / Dustin Lacy / David Lafont / Tommy Sheridan / Lorenzo Sariñana

Awards

Best Lighting Design (Steven J. Deidel), True West Award
Best Multimedia Integration (Steven J. Deidel, Kenrick Fischer, Kevin Zegan, Max Peterson and Brian Freeland), True West Award
Best New Play, True West Awards Nomination
Best Scenic Design (Steven J. Deidel / David Lafont), True West Awards Nomination
Best Sound Design (Dustin Lacy), True West Awards Nomination

Production History

February 15 – March 2, 2013: work | space :: Denver, CO

Media Coverage

LIDA Project’s R.U.R./lol uses robots to examine what it means to be human

– Westword
Photo Essay: My Night at LIDA Project’s ‘R.U.R./lol’

– CultureWest

Aggregate Immateriality

Aggregate Immateriality is an uplifting rumination on darkness, fear, & death, set in an abandoned slaughterhouse in North Denver’s Globeville neighborhood.In an experiential, interactive combination of theatre, dance, design, and site, we invite audiences to contemplate their mortality as we follow a friend through her transition from life into death. In a space made for animal mass murder, we offer gentle gifts and warm human contact, working to dispel our fear of the specter of death, and invigorate the exquisite sensation of being alive.

Come sit with us in the dark.

An immersive journey through an abandoned slaughterhouse.

An uplifting rumination on fear, darkness, & death.

A last dance made to be viewed in the dark.

Churn Creative | videography

Nicholas Caputo | expository sequence videography

NOTES & CONTENT WARNINGS

This event contains moments of:
Fog
Strobe
Prolonged darkness
Moderate physical touch
Vegan food & (non)alcoholic beverage service...

ALL the good stuff.

Please inquire further if you have allergies or skin sensitivities. This event is appropriate for people age 13 and older. This event is ADA compliant. Please contact us if you plan to attend in a wheelchair or have other mobility concerns.

This event involves walking, standing, sitting, and participating in activities with performers. Please wear closed-toed shoes and warm clothing. This event does not include jump-scares or other cheap tricks. This event does not depict violence, but does discuss the topic of death.

Selected Reviews & Features:

**KUNC**: "The building itself plays a starring role in the experience."
**Westword**: "Proscenium-free theater that mingles movement, narrative and participation into a new kind of show without barriers."
**5280**: "Mueller invented a world that exists in between life and death — asking us to face our fear of the latter in a building once known for it."
**KGNU**: "A beautiful, tender, cryptic tale – a truly unique Denver experience."
**Kit Baker**: "As powerful and spellbinding as anything I have experienced in Colorado."
**303 Magazine**: "Reaches beyond entertainment into a world of deep personal reflection."
**Ben Waugh**: "The caretaking of the audience is perfect!"

RAUSCH (German): intoxication; ecstasy; loss of self.

Each performance of RAUSCH begins in a nondescript shopping center parking lot, where 48 audience members are ushered onto a bus that transports them to to the In-Between, the space in nature where Persephone returns from the Underworld each spring.

On the bus, the audience is tasked with welcoming Persephone back and returning her to her mother, Demeter. Upon arrival, they are divided to partake in the rites of spring in preparation for her return. But things are not as they always are this time of year.

Merging Greek myth with rock music, exploring everything from love lost to lost children to the loss of self, RAUSCH will offer Boulder a singular experience marrying the power of immersive artistry with the glory of the Colorado wilderness.

RAUSCH is a collaboration between two premier organizations in Colorado's independent theatre scene: The Catamounts, Boulders award-winning theatre company specializing in audacious contemporary plays, and Control Group Productions, Denver's leading innovator in dance theatre and contemporary performance.