The Angola Project

The Angola Project is a series of multimedia lecture-performances that investigate the convoluted nature of storytelling, global travel, colonial history, and shifting notions of home in our age of polycultural mashup identities. It has its roots in travel lectures that emerged in the19th century with figures such as Burton Holmes, and eventually led to contemporary documentary filmmaking—as well slippery notions of authenticity” and “truth.” This trilogy of performances straddles performance, dance, filmmaking, and flat-out lying, as the lectures follow the real-life travels of Jeremy Xido from Europe to Africa to Asia, trying to get a feature film financed. The film is constructed and falls apart before the audience’s eyes again and again, as different versions of truth clash and collide. The third part of the work, Part 3–XIN, was commissioned by and developed at EMPAC, where the artists surrounded a boxing ring with four screens and tested interactive components, including a heart-monitor sensor, which could trigger audio and video, as well as speech-recognition software. CABULA6 is an internationally acclaimed performance and film company led by artistic co-directors Claudia Heu and Jeremy Xido. They search out non-traditional performance spaces that make it possible to walk the line between what is “real” and what is constructed, bringing audience members face-to-face with their assumptions and expectations about who they are and with whom they live. CABULA6’s work ranges from stage pieces, to site-specific works, to films, to projects of social intervention. The company has presented work in Europe, the United States, South America, Asia, and Africa.