The West Coast Premiere of Carla Harryman’s
Performing Objects Stationed in the Sub World

Since the late 1980s, Harryman has been collaborating with visual artists, musicians, and composers to create deeply woven performance works that give equal weight to each artistic medium. The principal artistic team for Performing Objects previously collaborated on Erling Wold’s chamber opera A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, presented at Intersection for the Arts in 1995 and ODC in 2000. The development process is based on the use of text, visual elements, and music as materials for improvisation in rehearsals. Thus, the performers become quite actively part of the collaboration ensemble. The principal actors in Performing Objects include Annie Kunjappy, Ken Berry, Roham Shaikhani and Walonda Lewis. Local writers and performers Taylor Brady, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Brent Cunningham, Patrick Durgin, and M. Mara-Ann comprise the Poets Chorus.

Performing Objects Stationed in the Sub World received an initial staged reading at Oxford Brookes University in England in April 2001; Small Press Traffic presented a staged reading of the script in February 2002 at CCAC as part of the San Francisco Poet’s Theater Jubilee celebration, and John Jakary of Zeitgeist Theater in Detroit directed a workshop production of the play in April 2002.