Other Inland Empires

Shimmering between here/there, self/other, now/then, Other Inland Empires is a stage performance which traces the Jewish roots of surf culture from Europe to California and back again. Inspired equally by historical coincidence, autoethnographic field work, and exploration of site, the piece was developed through 14 months of writing and devising. With palm trees, fabric, and a roving green screen, four actors, an in-audience musician, and a director-performer transform a bare stage into a shifting landscape, while the audience watches from the comfort of beach chairs. Drawing from strategies of postdramatic theater, performative autoethnography, and audience relations to installation and site-based performance, this work aimed to create an oscillating space in which story and image double and re-double upon themselves, the fictional interrupts the real, and the personal grazes the political.