{short excerpt - full performance is 90mins long}
Cast and collaborators
Zan Crawford
Sahil Kaur
Joshua Rodriguez
Emily Ann Scott
Keegan Smeza
Katherine Washington
Jacob Zelonky
an open-ended collaborative performance installation in which a group of professional actors respond to their experience of typecasting within the film industry. Jung’s performances weave together fragmented narratives around found objects, using these objects and their attributes as a trigger to produce a text that undoes their single story and derails categorical structure.
In Dramatis Personae, latin for the masks of the drama, she has worked closely with the actors on a set of scripts, which tease out and dramatically complicate the socially prescriptive roles they most often find themselves cast into based on appearance and IRL identity markers. Be it the bubbly side-kick, the sex-worker, the nerdy scientist, the sassy best friend, or the more loaded gang member, these types are all built on grim social-scripting, enforcing the assumptive onto the presumptive.
Her approach, generally process-oriented and anti-conclusionist, has led to a week-long workshop, in which speech acts, movements, and attributes are established through a variety of methods, only to collectively confuse, joyfully trouble, and earnestly merge them again. These typecast roles act as a foil for Jung and her actors to investigate internalized and externalizing otherness and figure out how much or how little is needed to draw up gated identities or to celebrate our porous selves.