Spring 2020: Disassembling Greek tragedy into its parts by staging the biography of The Dowager Empress Cixi as an exhibition. The audience and the chorus enter the theatre (place of seeing) through the parados - two piles of stone. Fall 2020: A dirge/a bloodline, an ode/an image, an entry song/soft lights.
Her tragic flaw remains an error of images/seeing/sight - of discerning reality from theatre.
All documentation by Sam Richardson
Dirge // Bloodline repeated three times: October 14th, October 16th, October 20th, 2020 in the CAC Gallery at UC Irvine.
A song of lamentation sung antiphonally by a company of mourners and one or more soloists, either actually over the dead body (called the ἐπικήδειον, ‘funeral song’)
MATERIALS: Seventy feet of seamless white, gaff, blood extracted from the top of my right hand, frozen and pulled by a string in my mouth on October 14th, 16th, & 20th, 2020
