ABOUT

This performance created for the Art Institute’s Fullerton Hall orchestrates a loosely gathered collection of international events from 1917: the music of Henry Cowell, a speech by W. E. B. Du Bois, the first film appearance by silent comedian Buster Keaton, Gertrude Stein’s modernist play An Exercise in Analysis; the journals of Russian surveyor Vladimir Arsenyev’s expeditions east of Siberia; the first poem published by Chilean surrealist Cesar Vallejo – all enacted alongside Constructivist set design and Taylorist industrial laborer drill choreography. This is not a dream considers performance as a machine to generate echoes between 1917 and 2017, to ask what has and has not changed, and what ghosts of unfulfilled revolutions populate the stage. This is not a dream was created in response to the Art Institute’s exhibition Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test.