Imagine how different your day could be if you were gifted an hour of deep, dreamy, healing rest, a sonic tonic and contemporary performance portal?
Join us in the OASIS
It may only be a mirage, but we leave refreshed, nonetheless.
What if we take performance seriously as a space for transformation, healing, and social change? How might we increase the impact of performance practices serving communities on a planet in need? Can a faux-asis be as nourishing as an oasis? What is needed now? These are just a few of the initial questions that sparked the creation of OASIS, the newest Livable Futures project during creative residencies in 2022. Since then the work has continued to develop and create a site of respite and recovery amidst the reverberating effects of the pandemic and escalating extreme events of climate change.
OASIS in development, 8 min. overview of project. Nov. 2022.
Footage from creative residency developing transmedia performance rituals for rest and recovery in residency at the Barnard College Movement Lab, NYC.
About the Project
OASIS is a new Mixed Reality Opera developing within the Livable Futures community. Integrating choreographic investigation into geothermal and oasis ecologies with immersive technology, activist participatory theater, improvisation, and the healing arts, OASIS is an offering. The work responds directly to grief and loss associated with the pandemic and climate crisis and the need for both recovery and transformative change.
Resisting dominant narratives of disaster and decline, OASIS creates a soft space for turning to toward the issues at hand. Participants are bathed in sound, stars, stories, and sensation in this 90-minute immersive experience. Warm water flows through the themes of the work but so does mirage and the impermanence and precarity of any site of refuge on the planet today. The literal and figurative metaphors of physical and emotional oases provide fertile ground for the imagination. The team is exploring Virtual Reality performance possibilities in another expression of their interest in sci-fi, faux-futurism, and creating a faux-asis that may be fake but is nourishing none the less. VR development includes a collaboration with Jameel Paulin on his research in afro-futurist design and shared interest in immersive environments for healing. Sound is performed, processed, and mixed live by Oded Huberman using custom audio software developed with electronic music composer Marc Ainger (ACCAD/Music). The creative team includes Byron Au Yong, internationally renowned contemporary artist who has composed an improvised song-cycle for OASIS drawing on his experience in Chinese and Korean vocal traditions and Zuniga Shaw’s background in North American folk music and Jewish ritual practices.
Oasis Residency Clip Reel: Sound Immerssion
