Survival In Ruins

Survival In Ruins is a memoir that contemplates grief, parenthood, and slowness. Inspired by the recent birth of her second son, a father with Alzheimer’s, and mycelium networks – a body moves forcefuly slow confronting the reality of the making and unmaking of a life. Lost, forgetful, in need, revealing its triumphs and tribulations.

Survival In Ruins asks us to sit inside growth and loss, stillness and silence, and what it means to be called into extreme presence.

During this performance, a large hand-knitted scenography will encompass the space mimicking forms of fungal organisms. A body moves in extreme slowness tending to the passage of presence to absence and absence to presence. An observation of how the time spent in making and losing life defies the logic of capitalist labor, productivity, sociality and forces an encounter with profound unpredictability. When moving and being with slowness, we come closer to modes of preparation for the irreconcilable, the unknowable, the unpredictable.

Credits:

Choreography/Performance Katie Vickers

Sound Grant Cutler, Philip Glass

Sound design Katie Vickers

Sound editing Michael Kiley, Albert Quesada

Set design Margot Becker

Lights Albert Quesada

Supported by Threshold Collective

Dates:

October 3rd & 4th 2024 - Shenandoah University, Winchester VA + after talk with local Dementia care workers

October 15th & 16th 2023 - MAAS Building Philadelphia, PA

September 12 2022 - Cannonball Festival (work-in-progress)

Image credit: @AlbertQuesada