Be among the first to see this unique, immersive performance created by theater innovators SITI Company and renowned visual artist Ann Hamilton.
Performance times include:
- Thursday, April 23 at 7:30 p.m.
- Friday, April 24 at 7:30 p.m.
- Saturday, April 25 at 7:30 p.m.
- Sunday, April 26 at 2 p.m.
Ticket prices are $20 general public, $17 members and $10 students. Seating is limited so visit the Wexner Center website to purchase tickets.
Ann Hamilton, Distinguished University Professor at Ohio State and professor in the Department of Art, met SITI Company through their repeat visits to the Wexner, which led to her inviting SITI actors and designers to take part in her widely acclaimed, large-scale installation the event of a thread at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in late 2012. This success triggered their interest in joining forces for their first full collaboration: a special performance installation work, the theater is a blank page, which will be finalized in residence and debut here as part of the Wexner Center's 25th Anniversary Season. Hamilton will work on every phase of the collaboration with SITI Company's co-artistic directors for this project Anne Bogart, Leon Ingulsrud, and Ellen Lauren. A number of graduate students from Ohio State's Department of Theatre are also involved in the performance, assisting with props and arranging the shifing configuration of audience seating.
Hamilton has a long history of including performative elements in her installation work, and the theater is a blank page brings to the fore her interest in shaping performance from a conceptual, visual art–based perspective. At the same time, the project draws on SITI Company’s consummate skills as theater-makers while pushing their aesthetic into fresh experimental territory. The work’s title metaphorically refers to the simultaneously solitary and immersive, sensory yet imaginative experience of reading. As an extension of this idea, Hamilton and SITI will focus their performance, in part, on the apparatus of the theater—its architecture, mechanics, and tools—as well as the transformative process of artists discovering what can be conjured there together with an audience.
Hamilton and SITI Company’s new work will also utilize text from Virginia Woolf’s pivotal modernist novel To the Lighthouse (1927). The novel’s evocative language and inventive narrative—which skillfully deploys shifting temporal and psychological perspectives alongside poignant ruminations on loss, subjectivity, and perception—make it a fertile point of departure.
Following the production, several members of SITI will stay in Columbus to conduct a teaching intensive with the Department of Theatre.
For more information about the performance, visit the Wexner Center event listing.
Photo credit: Katie Spengler
