The Company
- Susannah Yugler
- Graduate Fine Arts Department, Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
“The Company” is a 75-minute interdisciplinary performance work that meditates on scarcity mentality, desperation, and competition for resources in a declining empire. Combining elements of choreography, theater, and sculpture, the work revolves around an unnamed, ambiguously defined “company” on the brink of a pivotal decision, which sets in motion dynamics of fear, disillusionment and desire.
Based on extensive research of the history of the NEA 4 lawsuit (1990) and the 2008 financial crash, the work is deeply interested in political failures and their afterlives as systematic precarity but purposely avoids a clear referent. Rather, by representing the “company” as an alienating and puzzling superimposition – of an artistic co-op, a law firm, a tech start-up – the work develops an allegorical but concrete mode of inquiry, which enables it to tap the psychopathological beneath the sociological and the archetypical within the particular.