Echoes of A Tumbling Throne (Odas al fin de los tiempos) # 5, 6 + 7

Echoes of A Tumbling Throne (Odas al fin de los tiempos) is a live and video performance suite imagining our world 1000 years in a future in which current social structures -racial and gender hierarchies, humanity’s relationship to nature, the environment vis-à-vis technological, industrial, and capitalist society – have been radically upended. The landscape of this future world – its denizens, artifacts, and culture – provides both a site for considering new realities, unfettered by the current social order, and also serve as a distorted lens aimed at our present in keeping with the tradition of dystopian science fiction. This work speaks of the possibilities inherent in redefining ourselves in a world that – due to the conditions we’ve concocted in the anthropocene- has become aggressively hostile to our existence.Echoes… is a site to consider post-feminist, colored, and queer realities. Formatted in an episodic manner modeled after video game levels cum-telenovela episode (I call them “Liveles” a portmanteau of ‘levels’ and ‘niveles’; English and Spanish for ‘levels’, respectively). Liveles 5,6 and 7 focus on the role of spirituality through three apparitions modeled on cargo cult-inspired interpretations of Santeria’s Orishas. The piece is intended to be disorienting and meant to read as a visitation from spectres; at once weighty with a sense of augury while also somewhat indecipherable as though in a psychedelic trance where every symbol is lent multiple meaning.