For the past few years, Los Angeles-based artist Catherine Sullivan has created performances combining installation art, dance and traditional theater dialogue. Sullivan refers to her work as second order drama, in which the dramatic process becomes the spectacle. The result is a hybrid theater in which there is a radical alienation between the body as a vehicle of perception and the body as a vehicle of expression. Sullivan’s quirky postmodern works, whose references range anywhere from Hellen Keller to Ted Nugent to Trisha Brown, are often steeped in emotional excess offset by choreographed movements ground in modern dance and sign language.
The Renaissance Society has commissioned a new piece which will incorporate video, choreography, set design, and live performance.