Renowned visual artist Ann Hamilton and New York's SITI Company present the world premiere of the theatre is a blank page April 23-26 at the Wexner Center for the Arts. This unique, immersive performance is supported by the Wexner Center Artist Residence Award, and will be presented on the Mershon Auditorium stage at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 23 through Saturday, April 25 and at 2 p.m. on Sunday, April 26. Ticket prices are $20 general public, $17 members and $10 students. Seating is limited; tickets may be purchased through the Wexner Center website.

Ann Hamilton, Distinguished University Professor at Ohio State and professor in the Department of Art, met SITI Company through its repeat visits to the Wexner Cener, 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:  the theater is a blank page, which will be finalized in residence and debut 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 shifting 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