Event Host: Urban Arts Space
Short Description: Inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 Vision: Making the Invisible Visible is a new multidisciplinary performance that uses techniques from the arts of mime, music and magic to explore themes such as isolation, uncertainty, illness, confinement, democracy and joy.
Beginning in March of 2020, we were charged with spending most of our time at home. All work, teaching and learning was moved to our living spaces. For performing artists, these confined spaces became our temporary laboratory for creating new work and testing the boundaries of what’s possible in a virtual performance landscape.
Inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 Vision: Making the Invisible Visible is a new multidisciplinary performance that uses techniques from the arts of mime, music and magic to explore themes such as isolation, uncertainty, illness, confinement, democracy and joy. Created and performed by MFA theatre student Connor Graham, 2020 Vision is all about process. Integral to the task of creating a full evening-length mime piece is processing both personal and collective trauma — from COVID-19, to civil unrest incited by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, to the propulsion of misinformation from the Trump administration, to the 2020 presidential election.
The performance is comprised of 10 individual mime pieces, each representing a month from March-December 2020 and focused on a single theme or combination of themes. The pieces are performed in a randomized order, to a randomized music playlist, in a randomly selected amount of designated space from 100 square feet to 1 square foot. The performance seeks to contrast the grave uncertainty felt moment to moment throughout 2020 with the beauty, security and fluidity of mime technique.
