Tacit Consent (2016)

TACIT CONSENT 

Premiere: May 2016
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco

Tacit Consent is an immersive performance installation about personal privacy—what we choose to share with the public, what is shared with limited or no consent, and where and how we separate public from private. To see and hear everything you must walk about. As you move through the installation’s rooms, the sound environment changes. Live video projections from one area are projected into another, found conversations are embedded into the score, dancers pass through a cramped courtyard to get from room to room. Concurrent scenes, some you can see and some are obscured, intrigue you to explore. The project began with composer Dan Wool's concept of interweaving found conversations into the score and Matthew Antaky's installation design of four separate rooms with projections, some of live video feed, on the walls. I created the choreography using their constructs and the images of watching other people, being watched and being completely alone. The audience has the sense of watching brief scenes, of being drawn in to someone’s life for a brief spell, of a story being played out that; although we see only bits, we infer an emotional narrative. 

What intrigues me about watching other people and being watched is that we all do this all the time—in cafes, public transportation, on the street, whenever we are in public. It’s interesting; it generates empathy or anger or disbelief.  When does watching cross a line and become intrusive?

VIDEO TRAILER

FULL PERFORMANCE VIDEO>>

Photos: Benjamin Hersh
Video: Rapt Productions