Shelf Life

Description:

In Shelf Life a live action movie unfurls on stage, a film in which three desperate characters who inhabit a consumer wasteland become obsessed with an alluring icon. Each tries to possess and mold her in the form of their media-induced desires, even as she uses them as a means to her own consumptive ends. Fueled by jealousy, rage, and betrayal, this “love quadrangle” ignites into a bizarre and tragic struggle over the ownership of happiness.

Shelf Life uses found images, garbage, sampled sounds, and Real Time Film technique: a conceptual model collapsing performance, television, and movies using live action and video. It examines the use of image in entertainment, the experience of the image versus its manufacture, and the split between surface and interior.

Video:

Images:

Creation History:

2004
Kaiitheatre (Brussels, Belgium)
Hebbel Am Ufer (Berlin, Germany)
Festpielhaus Hellerau (Dresden, Germany)

2003
Pan Pan Theatre Symposium (Dublin, Ireland)
The Walker Arts Center (Minneapolis, MN)
Fresh Terrain/PS122/UT (Austin, TX)
The Wexner Center For The Arts (Columbus, OH)
The Warhol Musium (Pittsburg, PA)
Künstlerhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt, Germany)
Sommerszene (Salzburg, Austria)

2001
The Krain Theater (NYC)

Press:

“New York’s Big Art Group closed the Pan Pan Theatre Symposium with a multimedia event that can be taken as a template for use of the form” – Irish Times

“…clearly cutting edge.” – Lavender Magazine

“extraordinary new production…confirms the troupe’s standing as one of New York’s most innovative companies.” – Next Magazine

“…gloomily hilarious portrait of our disposable society.” – Backstage

” a rarity–a hybrid of film and play.” – Showbusiness Weekly

“hysterically wacky…beguilingly enjoyable…giddy” – AmericanTheaterWeb.com

“clever and jarring…inventive” – The Village Voice

“Ultra-clever…exposes the abscess behind the shiny promise of commercialism.” – Citysearch.com Critic’s Pick

“Shelf Life is a uniquely vivid cross betweena movie and a play. ” – Talkin Broadway