Tom Thayer: Circadian Plays

Thursday, October 9, 2pm–5pm: A Farmer’s Eye Tied to a Horse by a Silk Rope
Friday, October 10, 3pm–6pm: Let’s Get Higher Educated
Friday, October 10, 7:30pm: Supposed to Be Happy
Saturday, October 11, 6am: Counterdoses for the Home

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Please note the unique structure of this performance series: A Farmer’s Eye Tied to a Horse by a Silk Rope and Let’s Get Higher Educated (Thursday, 2–5pm; Friday, 3–6pm) are durational works; audience members will be permitted to exit and re-enter as they wish throughout the three-hour session. Supposed to Be Happy (Friday, 7:30pm) will run 45 minutes with no intermission. Counterdoses for the Home (Saturday, 6am) will have extremely limited capacity; no predetermined program exists for this special set.

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Over a three-day residency—featuring three smaller sessions and one larger-scale presentation—Tom Thayer activates a suite of durational videos and sonic objects, combining animation, collage, computerized graphics, and light design to stage what he calls a scenographic play. Working from a pedagogical and philosophical interest in childlike play, Thayer strives in each live performance to access an unmediated and unrepeatable mode of expression. Yet he often repurposes his found materials across events and mediums, generating motifs—spindly, animalistic forms, undulating sheafs of pixels—almost by accident, as an artifact of his intuitive process. Across these dreamlike recurrences, an unconscious selfhood coheres, disaggregates, and succumbs again to the ephemeral. As in lineages of experimental theatre, like Jerzy Gartowski’s intentionally aimless collectivities, the material output of the performance is always secondary. It is the intangible psychic force generated in the room that takes primacy.