SIBLINGS (ELATION VI)

Siblings (Elation 6) is the sixth and final part of The Elation Series, a sci-fi opera encompassing performance, music, sculpture, and video that he has been developing since 2011.

Performers: Colin Self, Lyra Pramuk, Tara-Jo Taschna, Sam Banks, lexi welch

String Ensemble: Ethan Philbrick, Natalie Steinbeck, Molly Goldman

Costumes by Vincent Tiley & effie bowen

Lighting Design by Jeanette Yew

Stage Design: Colin Self & Jeanette Yew

Video: Josef Kraska

Presented in collaboration with performers Lyra Pramuk, Tara-Jo Tashna, Sam Banks, and lexi welch, Siblings is a playful examination of Donna J. Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), in which the author offers new ways of reconfiguring our relationship to the earth and its inhabitants in the wake of ecological devastation foregrounding the necessity of new narrative structures to realize a better world.

Continuing themes of prior Elation performances and informed by the group’s epistemological research, Siblings roots itself in a transfiguration of relationships, placing a non-biological family as its focal point. These characters bound by curiosity and queer kinship navigate strategies for the art of living on a damaged planet. In excavation of the pendulous vogue of hope, Siblings points elsewhere: toward uncounted, disregarded stories and immeasurable experiences of trouble and care.

Siblings was first premiered at Donau Festival in Krems, Austria in 2017, then received it’s USA premiere produced by MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York in March 2018.

Siblings (Elation VI) was made possible through funding from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Material Art Prize.

photos by Maria Baranova