The World Inside This One
The World Inside This One is a work for stage and screen that invites us to consider our existence in relation to the past, present, and future lives of our homes.
The World Inside This One weaves poetry and video by us with a musical score developed and performed by Eighth Blackbird co-founders Matthew Duvall and Lisa Kaplan.
The work catalogues the quotidian, at times rendering it in fantastical terms. In slow-moving visual tableaus, a couple engages in ritualistic and domestic acts related to the home and nearby environments—a woman emerges from a lilac bush, a man shakes a rug over a back deck. Duvall and Kaplan’s spare, meditative score references works by Aphex Twin, David Lang, John Cage, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, and Hiroshi Yoshimura, among others.
While focusing alternately on everyday and quietly absurd actions—a man inching his way out of the narrow legs of a sideboard, or tulips being swung between windows for water—The World Inside This One meditates on cohabitation, change and permeability, nature’s order and entropy, and mortality. It asks us to consider the stories homes tell, and the residue of those who pass through dwellings. It raises questions about family histories, succession, and the ways we build narratives to make sense of our world.
About the work: The World Inside This One (2021—present)
Text, video, live music
Current duration: 25 minutes
WiP Premiere: April 23, 2021 (Chicago) in Eighth Blackbird’s Chicago Artists Workshop series.