"The high-tech proficiency of director Marianne Weems and her Builders Association is dazzling and unsettling … the low-tech skills of writing and acting that breathe life, humor and poignancy into a provocative exploration of technology as a global force for connection and disconnection." —San Francisco Chronicle
Read the entire SF Chronicle review of Continuous City »
Post-Show Q&A with The Builders Association on Fri, Nov 7.
Blending text, video, sound, architecture and stage performance to convey stories about life in the 21st century, OBIE Award-winning Builders Association exploits the richness of technology and media to extend the boundaries of theater. Co-commissioned by YBCA, Continuous City weaves together three story lines, including the journey of a traveling father and his daughter back home, tethered and transformed by speed, hypermodernity and failing cell phones. Featuring an interactive Web site and film clips taken in and around San Francisco, Continuous City illuminates our ever-increasing mash-up of global and local lives, of our real and networked experiences.
100 minutes, no intermission
The Builders Association
We are living in a moment caught between place and placelessness; our experience of being constantly connected through technology alters our sense of distance, intimacy, and how the world is mapped around us. CONTINUOUS CITY is a fable about how contemporary experiences of location and dislocation stretch us to the maximum as our “networked” selves move through the world.
From Shanghai to Los Angeles, Toronto to Mexico City, CONTINUOUS CITY tells the story of a traveling father and his daughter at home, tethered and transformed by speed, hypermodernity, and failing cell phones. The characters they interact with pursue their own transnational business, from an internet mogul exploiting networking across the developing world to a nanny desperate for acting work anywhere. The show reaches directly into each city it travels to through a participatory website and on-site filming to create a global and local production.
The last trilogy of The Builders Association’s performances have taken “real world” concerns as their subject matter—from travel in JET LAG (1998), to global outsourcing in ALLADEEN (2003), to the datasphere in SUPER VISION (2005). In this new project, we want to examine not only how we see what’s happening in the world, but how we deliver it to an audience—using “real world” events to include “real world” people.
—M. W.
The Builders Association, founded in 1994 and directed by Marianne Weems, is a New York-based performance and media company that creates original productions based on stories drawn from contemporary life. The company uses the richness of new and old tools to extend the boundaries of theater. Based on innovative collaborations, Builders’ productions blend stage performance, text, video, sound, and architecture to tell stories about human experience in the twenty-first century. From BAM to Bogata, Singapore to Melbourne, Minneapolis and Los Angeles to Budapest, The Builders Association’s OBIE award-winning shows have toured to major venues the world over.