Pony Express are breaking up with the land and embracing our new mistress the sea. Raft of the Medusa is an immersive and site responsive performance that creates a mass spectacle using the power of people, pop music, and hot chips to create a love triangle for the era of rising tides.
Developed as part of Adhocracy 2016 for Vitalstatistix
Presented as Sixth Wave as part of Underbelly Arts Festival 2017
Premiered as part of Climate Century 2018 at Vitalstatistix
“From the boat’s cramped cabin we witness Sinclair and Kronemyer adrift on a canoe, the performers swathed in thermal blankets as though anticipating rescue rather than any on-water skirmish. Has the Port, apparently second only to Bangladesh in terms of its vulnerability to climate change-induced sea level rise, flooded? Are these the only survivors? Eventually we draw up alongside them and they clamber aboard, dressed only in their underwear. I immediately note the red welts that cover their bodies, the source of which remains obscure — some kind of squid? — until Sinclair prostrates himself on the cabin floor and Kronemyer begins to apply suction cups to various parts of his body, a ritual evoking both the camp and the uncanny. They begin a conversation about failed relationships and use our suggestions to create a list, later transposed to Spotify, of good breakup songs (Cher, that ageless queer icon, features heavily). We fill a notebook with (un)romantic clichés: “it’s not you, it’s me; I need to find myself; this is goodbye forever.” Champagne is passed around to toast new beginnings, and I wonder if this is what I have inadvertently signed up for — a ceremonial uncoupling from the anthropocentric past as we have known it.”
— From Climate Century: Countering Apocalypse by Ben Brooker, for RealTime Arts, https://www.realtime.org.au/climate-century-countering-apocalypse/
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