“Nanza” was a performance art piece that was heavily costumed and audience based. It is a battle of territorial instincts. The viewer is invited in to watch and is given a choice to pick one of two masks. One is gold for the masculine fungi crab-like creator and the other red, for the more feminine alligator-scorpion creator.

This creates an environment where the viewer now becomes a participant by picking a side to root for. The textured soundscapes by Password:Dragon, are made up of distorted daily noises including eerie burping and glass shattering swamp-like battle sounds. The sound drops to a low menacing tone before a pink alligator comes out of a box (at first rolling around and showing off its cute little tale) while in the back of the room the golden fungi enters through the audience. Each creature battles to the best of its abilities. In the end the alligator loses an arm, and deciding that she cannot live with being defenseless she commits suicide.

Like dance, or puppetry, our movements are practiced and executed with great precision so that we can move like the animal. We strive to create a suspension of disbelief. We make installations, that can be viewed from all angles, wherever we perform. The performers weave in-between the audience while the viewers become characters within the performance (via their masks) and become surrounded by the artwork, or as we call it “in the surround.”

The masks play an interesting and important role in how the audience members react to the performance. The audience members can see each other standing around watching but they can not see their facial expressions. All they can see is a reminder of what their own mask looks like which blurs the line between nightmare and fantasy and contributes to the kind of mob mentality that comes with watching a fight.