Cinderbox 18 takes its cue from the media’s voyeuristic approach to “reality” to explore the comedy and anxiety in our hyper-networked culture. The work premiered in 2007 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Chicago Sun-Times called the work “a visually, kinetically, sonically and intellectually dazzling piece of dance theater that comments brilliantly on the whole process of creating, rehearsing, performing, viewing and critiquing dance.”
Cinderbox 18 takes its cue from the media’s voyeuristic approach to “reality” to explore the comedy and anxiety in our hyper-networked culture. Athletic choreography, improvisation, and a fragmented narrative characterize this witty dance theater work created by Julia Rhoads, and set to an original score by David Pavkovic. Responding to the purportedly unscripted and fly-on-the-wall observational style of reality TV, the work both exploits and makes indistinct the live and virtual, private and public, observer and observed, and the highly presentational and minutely subtle. Cinderbox 18 integrates video and clever dialogue to create a “show within a show,” wherein the performers become part of the audience. The result is an interactive environment shaped by the media technologies that alter our perception of how reality is generated. In response to its premiere at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Chicago Sun-Times notes: “Cinderbox 18… [is] a visually, kinetically, sonically and intellectually dazzling piece of dance theater that comments brilliantly on the whole process of creating, rehearsing, performing, viewing and critiquing dance. A deceptively difficult work that the eight members of Lucky Plush carry off as if it were the most easeful of long-form improvisations, the piece has a bit of Pirandello-like absurdism about it, as well as plenty of post-modern self-consciousness that has been neatly twisted into the most charming, self-mocking bits of playful humor.”
