Details

In their gulag-home, Brother and Sister reel from a trauma that revisits them in fragments. It's their birthday. They visit their parents' grave, get their daily dose of Vitamin D, consider the exit point. A trance-like soundscape of Russian electronica, the physical comedy of Buster Keaton, and the surreal aesthetics of Magritte combine to frame this silent comedy and quiet tragedy. Taking influence from Svetlana Alexievich's Second Hand Time, a documentation of post-Soviet Russian cultural trauma and suicide, the show treads between the slapstick nature of sibling rivalry and the dark, confusing pain of trauma. Isolated in their childhood home, the orphans use their own special, non-verbal language to conspire against their own entrapment. Researching sign language and the physical effects of trauma, Created a Monster seek to discover how the body speaks and how contact can be made before and beyond words.