2021

Created by Cole Lewis, Patrick Blenkarn, and Sam Ferguson / Canada “How many people, when given the choice, would live as a machine forever [2021] blows this conversation right open, using live projection feeds, electric guitar, and a video game that takes place in a hospital.” 2021 is a live performance where theatre, mortality, and video games converge, blurring the boundary between human remembrance and machine logic. An audience member steps into the role of Brian, an unhoused veteran reliving his final weeks inside a looping digital hospital encountering a labyrinth of corridors, bureaucratic dead ends, and fleeting human contact. Guided by his daughter’s narration, fragments of data become playable memory. Each decision glitches reality a little more. How do we provide dignity in death to those we fundamentally disagree with? Part elegy, part experiment, 2021 exposes the tenderness and terror of digital resurrection. It asks not whether machines can think, but whether memory itself is a kind of simulation. Jackie Liebergott Black Box Theatre Emerson Paramount Center 559 Washington St, Boston, MA 02111 2021 includes flashing lights, audience participation, violence, crude language, and references to war, racism, and sexism. Participation and active spectatorship are a central part of 2021. Note: This show is currently available as part of an ArtsEmerson Season Package or a group sale. Single tickets for the production will go on sale at a later date. Guilty by Association (GbA) shifts our process with each new project as we conspire with an ever-expanding network of collaborators from far-out disciplines to faraway places. Led by Co-Artistic Directors, Cole Lewis + Patrick Blenkarn, together we seek to expand what theatre can do, devising work from design ideas, exploring modes of storytelling, and scheming to fuse media to the stage. Developed in association with the National Arts Centre of Canada’s National Creation Fund, The Elbow Theatre, and in part through Mitu’s Artists at Home and Mitu’s Expansion Works Developed with the support of Canada Council for the Arts, Tarragon Theatre, Nightswimming Theatre, Design + Technology Lab, The Chrysalis, DART at Brock University, Playwrights Workshop Montreal, Precursor Lab, Theater im Pumpenhaus, and BMO Lab is a mom and mad theatre artist from St. Catharines, Ontario. She specializes in creating live performance from design ideas, exploring new modes of storytelling, and fusing technologies to the stage. Her practice includes directing, playwriting, and the design of moving image works. Twice nominated for Dora-Awards, Cole’s practice uses humour, design, and technology to explore notions of class and violence, expose questions of bias, and unsettle standard conceptions of ‘truth’ to explore alternative futures. She has an MFA in Directing from Yale and her thoughts on performance have been shared at LMDA, Howlround, FOLDA, Yale CCAM, and Canadian Theatre Review. is an artist working at the intersection of performance, game design, and visual art. His research-based practice revolves around the themes of language, labour, and democracy, with projects ranging in form from video games and card games to stage plays and books, with subjects as diverse as the labour of donkeys to the valuation of art to historical date farming practices in Iraq. He is a polyglot, programmer, animator, musician, and stage director. He is also the co-creator of asses.masses, co-founder of STUDIO FUNFUG, and co-founder of videocan, the national video archive of performance documentation. is an award-winning sound designer/composer from Toronto. After moving to Vancouver to study under acclaimed electroacoustic music composer Berry Truax he returned to Toronto where he became involved with theatre. This experience led him to enroll in the Yale School of Drama where he received an MFA for sound design. Since graduating he has returned to Toronto and has been working in the industry ever since. Photo Credit: Dahlia Katz Photo Credit: Dahlia Katz Photo Credit: Dahlia Katz “2021 is an ode to humanity – and a hopeful look at how AI could enhance, rather than detract from, what it means to create art with other humans.” “A technological visual display” “A truly brilliant and unique piece of theatre.”