Kjell Theøry: A Prologue
Friday, Jan 20, 20177 PM — Saturday, Feb 4, 20177 PMCST
| Graham Foundation, Madlener House: 4 West Burton Place
Chicago, IL, USRelated
Kjell Theøry: A Prologue is an Augmented Reality performance by Graham Foundation performance artists in residence, ATOM-r.
The performance juxtaposes the historical narrative of gay computing pioneer Alan Turing’s forced chemical castration and subsequent gynecomastia (development of breasts) with algorithmic mutations of Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1917 play, Les Mamelles de Tirésias (Tirésias’ Tits), a genderfluid spectacle for which the author invented the word surrealism. In Apollinaire's play, a woman Theresa, transforms into the male prophet, Tiresias, while her husband gives birth to 40,049 babies. The play was intended as a staged plea for the men of France to replenish the population after the devastation of the first world war.
In the last two years of his life, Alan Turing began to visit Scandinavia, seeking tolerance and following desire, following his prosecution for crimes of indecency. He had shifted his focus from computing to biology and was developing a theory of morphogenesis, the autonomous generation of flowers and other natural forms. It appears, from his notes, that he named his theory for a male Norwegian love interest, Kjell. His situation with someone he calls Den Norske Gutte, the Norwegian boy, is poorly documented but evidence suggests that it threatened to escalate into further legal troubles.
Kjell Theory is a poetic and choreographic system that blurs the boundaries between the binaries of physical and virtual space, past and future, male and female genders, and human and machine.
Performances will be on the following dates:
JAN 20, 7PM
JAN 21, 7PM
JAN 27, 7PM
JAN 28, 7PM
FEB 03, 7PM
FEB 04, 7PM
For more info, click here.
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