Check out the event site for all the information you'll need. Or here is a facebook thing. An event page. Share it, if that's the thing I want to say.
Also! Please watch the exactly delightful trailer below (put together by the incredible Mr. Zev Deans, who also put this whole show together, made the flyer, these gifs, and arranged for there to be tiki drinks in dinosaur cups on the night of the show):
EXPEDITION: AN EVENING OF EXOTICISM & ARMCHAIR TRAVEL from Spectacle Theater on Vimeo.
Expedition's program will consist of three parts:
1: Millions of Years Ago: A Primeval Bolero
(Concerning the Origins of Man and the Savage Early Days of the Earth)
For the Edification and Pleasure of the Audience: In Order to Please the Eye and Excite the Imagination
A trio of educational video tapes of stop-motion dinosaurs subjected to extensive re-edits and fitted with a new soundtrack of exotica, library music, and cosmic synthesizers. Saturating themselves in the exotic fiction and repetitive tropes of the dinosaur narrative as it is so often presented, the videos display: a pseudo-science-fiction fantasy wherein thunder lizards occupy a primeval, godless, and thoroughly exotic landscape of the sublime (an apocalyptic out-of-time zone where human life is horrifically/paradisally nonexistent) and are ultimately martyred so that mammals may live. Beneath the volcanic, eschatological skies of the First Judgment, the Noble Reptilian Savage necessarily expires, making way for the dominance of the imperial rat.
2: Expedition:
Expedition is a collage book, two years in the making, loosely following an archetypal expedition narrative and its ultimate descent into dissociative breakdown. Employing juxtaposition through the literal and symbolic act of collage, it delves into unapologetic fantasy while offering a sort of critique, explicating a surrealist-ethnographical culture-history of Western exoticism. Each page has dozens of collaged components, genuine artifacts of authentic exoticist 20th century culture, drawn from a vast collected archive; all of which are detailed (along with their sources and original context) in the book's dense index. The book will be presented as an analogue slide show (with a soundtrack elaborately comprised of exotica music and field recordings).
3: Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (Ports of Paradise):
A recut of a 1965 Hollywood recut (entitled Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, with a well-shoehorned-in Basil Rathbone) of a 1962 Soviet science fiction film, Planet of Storms (using also some additional footage from a further 1968 B-picture recut, Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women). The film follows an expedition to Venus, an exotic planet populated with dinosaurs, carnivorous plants, and mysterious native women. The film is re-edited (in chronological order, but greatly shortened, with redesigned sound) to reveal the classic expedition narrative at its core, with a preference for the sensory over the sensical. The result is a woozy narrative more in line with dream-state story-telling, surrealist strategies, or the psychedelic logic of midnight movies.
COME TO THE SHOW! I'LL BE THERE! WE CAN TALK ABOUT EXOTICA IN THE SAME PHYSICAL PROXIMITY! WE CAN DRINK FROM DINOSAURIC VESSELS TOGETHER! If you can't come to the show, and you are reading this from one of the almost infinite locations that are out of reasonable reach of New York, then please do know that your presence will be sorely missed. Perhaps recommend it to a friend, if you have one in the area. Or invite me to your town to do the show there! I'd come, probably!
Last thing before I go: I know I've mentioned this before, but distributable copies of the book are coming soon. There should be more information before September draws to a close.
