REST
Rest is a performance installation conceived by experimental performance-maker Annie Saunders, created with a new score by composer Emma O’Halloran, and lighting and interactive systems design by Andrew Schneider, currently in development and supported with residencies at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA. During 2020/21 the piece was also conceived as an interactive digital artwork for audience members at home through a commission at EMPAC.
“Every act of perception is an act of creation.”
Oliver Sacks
Rest is a performance installation for flexible spaces played by a chamber orchestra who you’re not always sure are there, based on and including recorded interviews with poets, scientists, futurists, authors and thinkers and including George Saunders, Ross Gay, David Abram, Maryanne Wolf, Mary Helen Immordino Yang — on sensory experience, the nature of consciousness, the suggestibility of the mind, and conversations with everyday folks talking about their earliest sense memories and their relationships with their smartphones.
In 2020, we created a proof-of-concept film to examine how our developing work Rest, originally conceived as an in-person music-theatre performance or time-based installation, might have an expression in a digital medium such as a screen-based or headphone-based experience for participants at home.
This piece was inspired by our research on the concept of rest, which revealed the profundity and magic of what we notice when we are able to pause: the play of light behind our eyelids, a patch of daylight moving across a wall, or colored lights of the city reflected in window panes. As a part of our dramaturgical research about what rest means in the modern world, we also conducted a series of interviews. Many conversations veered into discussions of managing relationships with screen technologies. We wondered if there was a way to make a meaningful experience informed by our research, perhaps interactive, perhaps not, perhaps including visuals, perhaps not, for audience members at home, on a device, either with a screen or audio-only.
