A Countercommons (The Trouble with Trouble)

2024

existing architecture, pine, spruce, maple, stainless steel, silicone caulk, inkjet on cardstock, hardware, cabling, servo motors, Arduino, altered construction cones, gloves, casters, radio transmitter, radio headphones, sound, altered military fatigues, PLA, glass beads, script, altered blazers, acrylic sheets, wigs

2 x 51 x 20.5 ft

Ruffin Hall, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA

stage, costume, and prop fabrication by the III; performance programming by Seamus Carey, Adrian Wood, and Jayme Kusyk; graphic design by Nick Labate; special thanks to Emma Todd and Lily Bukalski

A Countercommons (The Trouble with Trouble) was the inaugural installation of the Institute for Improvisational Infrastructures (III), featuring performance programs over the first week of April 2024 by Chicago-based artist Seamus Carey, Richmond-based artist Adrian Wood, and LA-based writer-director Jayme Kusyk. Converting the second-floor terrace of the University of Virginia’s Ruffin Hall into an experimental, modular structure that serves as stage, seating, and walkway, A Countercommons (The Trouble with Trouble) pairs the participatory, social demands of alternative theater with the site-oriented, spatial politics of institutional critique. How can a temporary, fragmented, and self-aware proscenium facilitate modes of playing, dancing, gossiping, criticizing, and otherwise making noise and trouble that the paradigmatic liberalism of the art institution can tolerate and endorse only insofar as it can make sense of “making trouble” as a properly creative, intellectual, and civic activity?

Check, Check

performance coding and object fabrication by Seamus Carey

6m loop over 4h

program blurb: Animatronic safety cones wander the stage, checking, listening to, and assessing it. Check, Check is a literal investigation of the stage at the center and periphery of A Countercommons (The Trouble with Trouble). Mimicking the fluidity of the stage as object, site, and tool, the safety cones’ performance is both a finale of the stage’s construction and an overture to the performances it will host throughout the week.

Battle Royale for the Soul of Our Country

sound mix and spoken choreography by Adrian Wood (available for download here)

performances by Strings Applewood, Lee Brooke, Gabby Chirano, Skyler Heiser, Tedra James, Danny Loren, and various members of the public

1h 1m

program blurb: Dancers in a silent disco satirize the vision of a ‘culture war.’ These dancers comprise a flaccid would-be paramilitary that wiggles and glitters, laughing at polemics. This dance party comes one year after the Washington Post published leaked text messages invoking a "battle royale for the soul of UVA and a microcosm of what must happen across America to save the soul of our country." These rebel soldiers are not just without a cause; they are without a center. What will they construct to validate their need for conflict? 

Selling C-Ville

performance script and direction by Jayme Kusyk

performances by Holly Acker, Danait Haddish, William Truong, and Lilla Woodard

1h

program blurb: Six real estate agents, working for a local real estate firm, attempt to sell Ruffin Hall to passersby. Tension rises between the agents as their petty interpersonal grievances come to light — interfering with, though occasionally abetting, their sales — which, in addition to Ruffin, extend to other properties around Charlottesville: residential, commercial, “historically significant,” and otherwise. A playful yet not wholly toothless surrealist satire of white upper-class womanhood, colonization, and capitalism, as these forces exist in and act upon Charlottesville.