#4trains

[theremina]

#4TRAINS director Christine Marie #YBCA #theatre #puppetry #shadowpuppets #lightshadow #rehearsal (at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts)

[bamuthi]

I was born and raised in a City big enough to swallow the light, so forgive me if I’m not fully trusting of shadows. I’m not deeply bought into the secrets they hide, or the matter they mask. Or at least I wasn’t until I encountered the work of Christine Marie, first in a theater in San Francisco, and then on the global stage at TED. She is an inventor of analog that intentionally uses the dispersion of shadow to speak silent poems. She makes color that the fortuitous eye absorbs into the body as emotion. She has the audacity to disrupt light, and to weave a timelessness into its shaped absence, to wordlessly make a story of ambition and migration out of negative space.

  ‘fore trains, we did what exactly?…dreamt a lot about ‘over there’…waited on boats and ponies…took endlessly long walks before following through on promises…

  4 Trains is a contemplation on the moment before technology speeds everything up. The opposing forces in thematic play in this evening’s presentation tug hard at the dissonance of the present moment, a time of light beaming from silver boxes, hoping to conjure the intimacy of a darkness pulling us close. The performers produce a live silent film without the benefit of digital animation and in direct contradiction of the wizardry we are growing accustomed to in contemporary cinema. Christine Marie pays structural and spiritual homage to the Balinese tradition in which she apprenticed for more than a decade, but within her primordial evocations there is near future adaptation and grandly scaled wisps of the pioneer approaching frontier. This work arrives at YBCA seeking to model how we live with dignity in conditions out of our control, an expressionistic calling out in the shadow of days to come…