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”

Durational works; audience members will be permitted to exit and re-enter as they wish throughout each three-hour session.

Friday, October 10, 7pm doors; 7:30pm performance: “Supposed to Be Happy”

Larger-scale presentation; 45 minutes with no intermission.

Saturday, October 11, 6am: “Counterdoses for the Home”

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.