Uncanny Valley blog: Afrofuturism

Afrofuturism

In doing some research on Afrofuturism today I found this website (with an incredible graphic on the splash page).

It's got links to audio samples and some history of afrofuturism.

This got me thinking I should look into the music of George Clinton / Parliament, Grace Jones and our old friend Sun Ra (remember Julie's Space is the Place etude back in Project X days???).

So here are some of the fruits of my labors:

George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic, Mothership Connection:

This is the video for Grace Jones' Corporate Cannibal, pretty trippy:

"I'm a man eating machine. You won't hear me laughing as I terminate your day. You can't trace my footsteps as I walk the other way. I'm a man eating machine. A man, man eating machine."

And... uh, here is Grace Jones singing Little Drummer Boy on PeeWee's Playhouse. Yes.

Sun Ra, Space is the Place -- I cannot explain this video but you should watch it:

Ok, just have one more...

Wu Tang Clan's Killer Bees video:

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Uncanny Valley mandate:

Let’s play with the audience’s memories and with our own memories, and use the mechanism of live theatre to identify and explore memory as the very essence of what makes us human.

Theatre is a time-based art, a memory machine, let us use it not to show or tell, but to strive for the impossible goal of manipulating and inhabiting memories on stage with an audience. Let us do this to spark our own memories, and to trigger those of the audience, in order to provoke reflection about the slipping away of time, and the relishing of present moments that will soon become past memory. Let us do this in a kickass psychological, sonic, poetic, and physical way that can only be done onstage via song and spectacle.

In Uncanny Valley, we create a radically new theatre experiment that is based on the process and intoxication of the phenomenon of memory.

EVOLVING CONCEPT (now outdated)

We are in a place and time when we don’t really know who we can trust. There’s something scary and supernatural playing out in regular life. You can’t see it, you can’t prove it, but you know it’s there. What would it mean to escape the anxiety of your own mind into a different reality? You would need to find a place to escape to. A beautiful pink world, a snowy world, the coldness of the desert, the emptiness of space and a little blue dot. What a beautiful thing to be isolated in a vast landscape, filled with wonder, and you don’t feel lonely at all.
Hand2Mouth presents a speculative performance in 4D. It’s more magical if you don’t know how it works.

CONTENT

- Anxiety & loneliness
- Escapism
- Creating specific new worlds -- multiple realities
- Primitive/everyday/simple vs. Technological/supertech/complicated
- Technology & tools: simple / complicated, human relationship, incredible things it allows to happen.
- Fundamental humanity, human-ness -- focusing on this, not on the aliens
- Little Prince
- Pregnancy

FORM

- Episodic structure: what links the worlds is slowly / surprisingly revealed
- Throughline, elements or journey that links stories
- Creating specific new worlds -- multiple realities
- Sensuality, hyper visual, trippy
- Pushing to a level of intensity, proficiency (physically, performatively)
- Extremes of quiet, extremes of loud -- dychotomies between different extremes
- Bending reality -- bread skitters across table
- Surprising audience: sudden reveals, cliffhangers, messing with expectations
- Grand opera

Uncanny Valley blog

Afrofuturism

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