CAGE

a solo with an invitation for collaboration
Created in 2014
50 minutes
sound track, film, text and score by Katie Duck

This performance contains images that provide a theatrical theme by way of a back drop film, sound track, black dress, a chair, three wigs, texts, movement and sound. 

My text is non narrative based on four titles; The Institutionalization of Everything,  Love, The Anatomy of the Vagina, Death. 

The sound track is a playground I change for each performance. It contains sonic toys that create a tension alongside my nerdy research into pop music that I add for each culture that I visit. The back drop film provides a base for a light designed that I create once I am in the theatre space where we play.

The text is placed in and around  body, space, sound and objects that I discover in each location. I design a sound track (playground) for each event according to songs or sounds the collaborating artists wishes to hand me, according to the culture where I am playing and according to the space where it is played.

I use CAGE as a score that I can share with artists where I travel, offering a platform to voice their artistic, cultural and personal expression. I have worked with 15 different music, dance and actors since 2014. My ambition is to play CAGE in as many  artists and cultures as possible so that the material I have written in the score CAGE can continually develop and be played in real time for live time audiences. 

My relationship to public’s with CAGE is that they notice that I am a guest in their culture and that the real time performance element of the work places them as witnesses rather than passive aggressive viewers.

The title CAGE refers to the composer John Cage whose scores, among other things, introduced musicians to choice. This work uses choice in how the performers form a relationship to the public, in how the guest artist is integrated into the score and how the piece welcomes improvisation.

The title CAGE also refers to how the institutionalization of absolutely everything, the loss of love, the need to face the anatomic technology perfection of what the Vagina actually is and the use of death as tactic for fear has suppressed our emotions and feelings forcing us all to live in a CAGE.

We view distressing events daily and are able to tuck this in a pocket of our consciousness until eventually panic attach grips our spirits and anything social seems beyond reason. The human condition to feel what we see and hear is numbed, boxed away in the normal. The new normal is violence. The new normal leaves little space for anyone to feel the violence. Language, politics, money freezes society in a delusional state of mind. The continual alienation of woman as an integrate role in our societies (and I do not mean joining the boys club or playing along with the rituals of male bonding) suppresses men and woman alike. 

CAGE is played by one nomadic woman and a artist or artists from the culture where it is played. It has been played by several different gender and orientation combinations of artists. CAGE offers no solutions by way equal rights using sports metaphors, winners or looser. Cage is about – total take over.

CAGE has been played in Italy, the USA, Hong Kong, Spain, Holland, Slovenia, Argentina, Canada, France and Mexico.