Buena Vista: Illumination

Mixed Media Performance

Performance: 15 min.

Created with support from the St. Ann’s Warehouse and the Henson Foundation NY.

Presented at the St. Ann’s Warehouse in Labapallooza 2018

Audio score composed and performed live by Sean Petell
Documentation by Teddy Wolff

2017-2018

Buena Vista is a live video-puppetry performance of backgrounds and landscapes. To house the landscapes, I build objects I called “Bucket Theaters” inspired by the interiors of sink traps, devices that collect debris and keep it from entering the sewer drain.

The narrative of this experimental performance is a journey through time and space: zooming into a wall vent to discover a solar system, and within that, the creation of civilization. With no discernible figures, the performance is preoccupied with landscape and planetary creation. Actions that occur over cosmic and geologic time. These vistas are constructed onstage from mundane everyday materials: mountain ranges of ceramic clay, orbiting planets of rubber balls, clouds of wood glue, and pepto-bismol volcanoes.