Campus News

PhD student to stage work at Hallwalls

Excursions into Unknowable Worlds.

“Excursions into Unknowable Worlds” brings together an ensemble of musicians and dancers, as well as lighting, audio and set designers to interact with a spatialized environment at the High Temp Warehouse.

By SUE WUETCHER

Published September 9, 2016 This content is archived.

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“There are always obstructions and obstacles that get in your way, and it’s the ways in which you choose to cope and deal and maneuver around or work with those obstructions that creates your productivity or potential creativity. ”
Stanzi Vaubel, PhD candidate
Department of Media Study

“Excursions into Unknowable Worlds,” media study PhD candidate Stanzi Vaubel’s site-specific immersive performance that was staged at the Hi-Temp Fabrication warehouse last May, is coming to Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center on Sept. 14.

But due to the dramatically different layouts of the two event spaces, Vaubel had to re-invent the Hi-Temp show for Hallwalls. She says she’s bringing it to the venue “through the eye of the glide cams, the cinematographers who witnessed the performance through the lens.”

The screening, accompanied by a live sound score, will take place at 8 p.m. at Hallwalls, 341 Delaware Ave., Buffalo.

The Hi-Temp venue, located at 79 Perry St. in the Cobblestone District of Buffalo, features an open warehouse layout with many pillars, “where audience and performer mingled together (during the performance), making it less clear who was performing and who was watching,” Vaubel says. Hallwalls, in contrast, is a traditional events space “with an ‘audience’ and a ‘performer,’” she adds.

The Hallwalls space, though, “will be transformed to reflect the feeling that was evoked in a much more immersive way at Hi-Temp,” she says. 

“Excursions into Unknowable Worlds” brings together an ensemble of musicians and dancers, as well as lighting, audio and set designers “to interact with a spatialized environment at the High Temp Warehouse.” The project, Vaubel explains, “is very much wrapped up in the idea of getting lost in a place you don’t know and finding your bearings there.”

“There are always obstructions and obstacles that get in your way, and it’s the ways in which you choose to cope and deal and maneuver around or work with those obstructions that creates your productivity or potential creativity,” she says.

"I want the audience to walk away with a sense of compassion for themselves and for other people; I want artists to consider making work that just slightly alters our perceptions, work that encourages kindness -- a tolerance for differences and misunderstandings.

“I am interested in the power of collective dynamics when such un-knowing is permitted into all of the quotidian moments that compose our lives,” she says.     

For a preview of “Excursions into Unknowable Worlds,” watch this video.