“The veils between worlds are thin and we can easily slip through.”

In response to a year of breaking open and realities colliding, we collaborated with nine other artists to create a personal performance that explored portals, gateways, and the movement between realities, past and present, real and speculative.

To begin the process, artists were provided decaying antique traveling trunks to be used as physical vessels in creating their individual performance pieces. From these vessels, each artist was asked to conjure forth the things, people, and ideas—whether they be from the past, present, or not yet in existence—that they wanted to make seen, embody in this moment, and carry into a new, co-created future with each other. For some performers, this meant reaching into the past: one performance recalled the performer’s grandmother’s hat shop that was once open in the neighborhood, incorporating the repetitive act of making and wearing hats throughout the performance; another performer drew up ancestral family ties as well as connection to land and healing through song, meditation, and plant cultivation during the performance. For other performers, this meant creating what could be, including a dance piece embodying flight from constraints, and a poetry piece using words and ideas to fill individual balloons that eventually created tangible mass and a collective lifting-up.

“In Plain Sight(site)” became a singular performance derived from these different pieces weaving in and out of each other. The space of the performance became a sort of interdimensional transit point where audiences witnessed the pieces rise, fall, and cross over each other, eventually collectively swelling together into a cacophonous finale where all individual performances became a speculative vision for the future.

As a distanced performance in the time of COVID-19, audiences gathered in masks on the sidewalk outside the performance space and witnessed the performance from the large storefront windows and open doors of the venue. “In Plain Sight(site)” was meant as an opportunity to collaborate and create within the means and constraints of our current environment and with the resources we had at hand.