Open Door
Work
Open Door: A Dance Puppet Music Odyssey
"Open Door" by Loco7 is a puppet-music theater piece exploring immigration and emigration, to and from the United States and beyond. Utilizing original rhythmic music, live musicians, dancers, handheld stick puppets, masks and larger then life marionettes, the piece will explore the paranoid perceptions, longings to belong and feelings of alienation among the immigrants and second generation Americans.
The piece is an urban fantasy set in NYC where various people live. Its central metaphors all derive from the paranoid perceptions that keep new immigrants and naturalized citizens "Americans" from seeing clearly, as well as the immigrants' search for the "American Dream" that can propel them into a more hopeful future. Puppet theater provides an articulate medium for contrasting the immigrants' inner and outer realities.
There are eighteen-foot apartment buildings where, in each window, a large marionette is attached to a dancer downstairs, as if to say, "I am myself, and the puppet attached to me is my background." There is also a massive weltanschauung scene where governments and corporations suck through straws from a huge plastic globe, while people metaphorically drown in the foreground. Video segments deal with the literal metaphor of an "open door" -- people opening a door to leave a house, to cross a threshold, to run away, to confront the other side, to search for something new. The characters ask, "Will we ever fit in and be accepted as "real" Americans or will we be stuck facing the same issues that drove us from our homelands?"
press release
The piece is an urban fantasy set in NYC where various people live. Its central metaphors all derive from the paranoid perceptions that keep new immigrants and naturalized citizens "Americans" from seeing clearly, as well as the immigrants' search for the "American Dream" that can propel them into a more hopeful future. Puppet theater provides an articulate medium for contrasting the immigrants' inner and outer realities.
There are eighteen-foot apartment buildings where, in each window, a large marionette is attached to a dancer downstairs, as if to say, "I am myself, and the puppet attached to me is my background." There is also a massive weltanschauung scene where governments and corporations suck through straws from a huge plastic globe, while people metaphorically drown in the foreground. Video segments deal with the literal metaphor of an "open door" -- people opening a door to leave a house, to cross a threshold, to run away, to confront the other side, to search for something new. The characters ask, "Will we ever fit in and be accepted as "real" Americans or will we be stuck facing the same issues that drove us from our homelands?"
press release
2006
English
WORK.2006.0016
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