The Collected Works has been collaborating with The Museum of Performance + Design to develop and perform a new site-responsive performance based on materials found in the Museum’s performing arts archive. The project brings together artists devoted to creating theatrical performances within non-traditional environments and a rare collection representing the rich history of the San Francisco performing arts. It aims to present an innovative response to bringing an archive to life while redefining the boundaries of theater-making and dramaturgy.

What to expect:

Four researcher-artists from The Collected Works will activate materials from our archive through performance. Guided by pre-determined rules, they will explore our stacks and pull materials from our diverse collections. These materials will be intermittently activated by the performing artists through speech, movement or play. Through this real time activation, impromptu narratives will form invoking people, places and histories of the past, and evoking new connections, situations and conditions of human and dramatic interest. Through the durational performance, journals, correspondences, rare books, programs, unpublished manuscripts as well as recordings and visuals from the archive will accumulate in the performance space leaving a visual incremental trace of the remnants of history and the passing of time.

Audience members will be immersed in an environment charged with history and have an extended, novel and three- dimensional experience of words, sounds and images from our archive as re-imagined and brought to life through the artists’ performance methodology, actions and use of space. The durational performance will accommodate a wide and diverse audience and allow for those in attendance to come and go and experience the transformation of the site and of the performers’s engagement on their own time and over time. Archive Life will take place on twice on June 17 and June 18, and will offer a different performance experience each night. Paid admission will give you access to both performance nights.

This project is funded in part by the Zellerbach Family Foundation and W & F Hewlett Foundation

4:30pm Doors open
5:00pm Performance (duration: 5hrs; audience can come and go for the length of the performance)
Museum of Performance + Design
893B Folsom StreetOpen to the public
General Admission $12 (One ticket gives you access to both performances)
MP+D members $9.50
Questions & info:
415.741.3531
info@mpdsf.org