THIS EVENT WILL HAPPEN IN THE NEW WU RECITAL HALL (FORMALLY 125 MORRISON HALL IN THE DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC) (Free Admission)

Fairy tales about love, power and money, in four acts, based on The Alices Virtual-Reality Ballet, a collaboration by Claudia Hart and Edmund Campion, taking place over seven years, between 2013 and 2020. Written by Claudia Hart, 2022-2023, and rewritten in collaboration with Tommy Martinez in 2024. Live Music Composed and Performed by Tommy Martinez. Event Production by Andrew Blanton

TOUR DATES

24 September, Tuesday: MEMORY THEATERS at SJSU, Artist talk from 5-6 pm, Show at 6 pm

26 September, Thursday: MEMORY THEATERS at Gray Area (2665 Mission St, SF)  Doors open at 6 pm with Show at 7 pm

28 September, Saturday: MEMORY THEATERS at the new Wu Recital Hall located at 125 Morrison Hall (Music Department), Show at 8pm (Free Admission)

Hart bio

Since the late 1980s, Claudia Hart, artist and Professor Emeritus at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has used 3D simulation technology to produce subversive works on identity and experience that cross the virtual and physical worlds. A mixed-reality artist, her art takes diverse shapes, from tangible installations and sculptures to projection-mapped performances and live storytelling, all hybrid works that explore the poetic threshold between the concrete and abstract.

Memory Theater Description

In the Memory Theaters, Claudia Hart recites personal fables that hybrid Grimm's fairy tales with ghost stories and Gothic fiction, telling stories about a digital artist trying to find her way in a techno-culture that is still dominated by bro-politics and ageism. This world hinges on its innovation culture, one that is invested in eternal newness and rapid-fire obsolescence but otherwise an extension of a larger artworld, where power, money, status, and adherence to a narrow insider code of ethics and behavior dominate. The Memory Theaters 2024 track Hart’s transformation of her own personal history, generational trauma and psychological dissonance, as she navigates the space of the creative arts, in order to produce these Memory Theaters. Martinez’s dark and haunting music is rehearsed but improvised and processed live, setting the pace and mood of this powerfully emotional narrative.

The Memory Theater of Claudia Hart (2023-2024), transforms the contents of her archives into a new work. In the tradition of the Wooster Group, Hart’s Memory Theater takes the form of a  40-minute theatrical monologue combined with animations that include experimental avatar dance, 3D animation and video recordings of live performances, all produced for The Alices Virtual-Reality Ballet, a collaboration between Claudia Hart and Edmund Campion that took place over the course of seven years between 2013 and 2020. One of the many iterations of this work was a live Virtual Reality version, produced in 2018 by Tommy Martinez, in a Tech Residency at  Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY. This summer, Hart and Martinez have returned to this earlier piece in order to rework it in relation to the public politics of 2024.