March 2027
Three Thousand Years of Overacting
Over four nights, The History of Pretending travels the full length of what we call theater, from the Greek chorus to the empty stage, from Shakespeare’s Globe to the performance art of the last century. Each evening takes a different idea of what acting is, what a play is, and what an audience is for.
Like in a legal dispute that has been running for 2,500 years, no two accounts agree: The Greeks believed theater could save the polis. The Elizabethans turned murder into entertainment. The Romantics worshipped genius. The avant-garde tried to abolish theater several times, usually with public funding.
Four nights. One art form. A long-standing disagreement, now performed in public.
March 2027
Three Thousand Years of Overacting
Over four nights, The History of Pretending travels the full length of what we call theater, from the Greek chorus to the empty stage, from Shakespeare’s Globe to the performance art of the last century. Each evening takes a different idea of what acting is, what a play is, and what an audience is for.
Like in a legal dispute that has been running for 2,500 years, no two accounts agree: The Greeks believed theater could save the polis. The Elizabethans turned murder into entertainment. The Romantics worshipped genius. The avant-garde tried to abolish theater several times, usually with public funding.
Four nights. One art form. A long-standing disagreement, now performed in public.
May 2027
In every culture, humans create objects to mediate the world: to confront pain, express pride, explore frontiers, heal bodies, organize labor, satisfy desire, and cultivate creativity.
One Day the Objects Will Be Shown presents these impulses through a series of archives in which the objects themselves are withheld.
Visitors encounter not the artifacts, but the human conditions that produced them.
May 2027
In every culture, humans create objects to mediate the world: to confront pain, express pride, explore frontiers, heal bodies, organize labor, satisfy desire, and cultivate creativity.
One Day the Objects Will Be Shown presents these impulses through a series of archives in which the objects themselves are withheld.
Visitors encounter not the artifacts, but the human conditions that produced them.
Starts in the second part of 2027
In our last cycle, The Rashomon Cycle, we explored the Rashomon effect, the now widely recognized term for how different eyewitnesses interpret the same event in radically different ways. This effect lends itself naturally to court drama, and one of our shows, I Was an Elephant Once in Cambodia, was staged as a courtroom. Our core technique was to juxtapose opposing viewpoints as a kind of public debate, people arguing their versions of events in front of an audience, using performance to push historical facts, data, and opinions into public discourse.
That form led us to the next question: what if we keep the conversation but kill the debate? What if a public square replaces the courtroom, not people arguing over competing versions of events, but people dramatically conversing, trying to reach common ground?
That’s our point of departure for the next cycle. As always over the last twenty years, each cycle has led to the next.
(A note: academic literature usually calls this „dialogue.“ We prefer „Conversation as Dialogue“ for this cycle; it carries a more specific theatrical meaning, and staying close to everyday vocabulary matters here.)
Starts in the second part of 2027
In our last cycle, The Rashomon Cycle, we explored the Rashomon effect, the now widely recognized term for how different eyewitnesses interpret the same event in radically different ways. This effect lends itself naturally to court drama, and one of our shows, I Was an Elephant Once in Cambodia, was staged as a courtroom. Our core technique was to juxtapose opposing viewpoints as a kind of public debate, people arguing their versions of events in front of an audience, using performance to push historical facts, data, and opinions into public discourse.
That form led us to the next question: what if we keep the conversation but kill the debate? What if a public square replaces the courtroom, not people arguing over competing versions of events, but people dramatically conversing, trying to reach common ground?
That’s our point of departure for the next cycle. As always over the last twenty years, each cycle has led to the next.
(A note: academic literature usually calls this „dialogue.“ We prefer „Conversation as Dialogue“ for this cycle; it carries a more specific theatrical meaning, and staying close to everyday vocabulary matters here.)