“SCREAM DYNAMO SCREAM DYNAMO SCREAM” by CAROL performance group

CAROL is a Brooklyn-based performance group led by the creative duo of Skye Fort and Mike Steele. Alongside a rotating team of collaborators, they create new works of experimental theatre that face hard truths with humor, poetry, and an embrace of the bizarre.

In SCREAM DYNAMO SCREAM DYNAMO SCREAM a girl discovers she’s a chatbot. A boy commits a sacrifice in the name of electricity. A child tries to speak the language of God. And the datacenter keeps getting bigger and bigger.

Synopsis:

Between 1927 and 1929, Eugene O’Neil attempted to write a play concerning humankind’s loss of spirituality in the wake of rapid technological progress. He called it Dynamo. The play was terribly reviewed and ultimately failed at reaching the promise of its premise. In SCREAM DYNAMO SCREAM DYNAMO SCREAM, CAROL performance group revisits this text and brings it into the age of A.I. They deconstruct its elements, scraping it for data in the mode of a large language model, to understand what Eugene was attempting to say. Ultimately reduced to a series of algorithms, the performance turns into a mash-up of movement opera, nonsense poems, and collaged images. Incorporating influences from The Legend of Kaspar Hauser, the writings of Ray Kurzweil, and science-fiction B-Movies, the piece questions whether humanity can successfully separate itself from technology and, if not, should we all stop fighting the inevitable and start thinking, acting, and performing like the machines?

Saturday, May 30th, at 7:30pm NACL invites audiences to witness excerpts from the play with a demonstration of design elements, and discussion of themes and process. Homemade soup and conversation with the artists will follow the presentation.

More information and reservations at NACL.ORG.