Zoology
In Development
Zoology is a subverted performance lecture about wildness and extinction. It was inspired by found slides taken at the Bronx Zoo in the 1980s and Margaret Thatcher’s refusal to transport a Panda to America on her first diplomatic trip to visit Ronald Reagan. It also came out of Talya’s early desire to be a “ballerina and a gorilla” when adults asked her what she wanted to do when she grew up.
The work consists of a series of zoo anecdotes told in a lecture style that also incorporates childhood stories about New York City, tangential associations with The Wizard of Oz, and the history of menageries in Europe. The lecture is one layer of the work and while it unfolds two children are on stage unpacking, stacking, and arranging a large box of animal figurines across the space. The lecture will continuously be interrupted by animal enactments that start civilised and lean further and further into wildness.
A work about the loss of wild places, our destruction of nature, and how we have fundamentally lost touch with our true natures in the civilising process.