And You Were Wonderful, On Stage

On the final evening of Cally Spooner’s EMPAC production residency, in which she will be shooting her new film work And You Were Wonderful, On Stage in Studio 1, the artist invites you to be part of a live studio audience.

A performance with multiple actors, dancers, and stage sets that attempts to integrate the process of filming into the production itself, the event will be live-streamed and take on the format of a TV variety show. Directed by the artist and technical team to provide laughter and applause, the audience will be integral to the film’s production as both audience and actor.

Using assemblages of theory, philosophy, pop music, current affairs and corporate rhetoric to write—and casts of arguing characters to help her perform—Spooner produces plotless novellas, disjunctive scripts, looping monologues, and musical arrangements to stage the movement and behavior of speech. Appropriating different performance genres, such as the Broadway musical, the television commercial, and the radio play, Spooner considers how dematerialized, indeterminate, unmediated performance can sit within the extreme visibility of entertainment and today's attention economies.