THE KEY GAME PROJECT: Sleep, Staring, Well 
Choreography and Directed by Kristen Smiarowski

January 16 - 25, 2014
Automata

An immersive multimedia performance event and installation about the construction of cultural memory. It is the third phase of Smiarowski's multi-year series, THE KEY GAME PROJECT. Reflecting upon the attempts to create a coherent history of the Holocaust by the generations who did not live through it, this series echoes the very subject it contemplates: each work in THE KEY GAME PROJECT is a memorial to the one that preceded it.

Audience members experience Sleep, Staring, Well on foot as they move freely through the performance and gallery space. As they walk, they encounter dance performances, live music, video and sound installations, and art objects.

Within the performance space there are dedicated areas that invite audience members to add their memories to the work through movement, drawing, and written word.

This project is a collaborative effort between Smiarowski, Los Angeles-based dancer and featured performer Rosalynde Loo LeBlanc, Berlin-based dancer Arianne Hoffmann, composer and visual artist Douglas C. Wadle, video artists Ann Kaneko and Andrea Keiz, archivist Kathy Carbone, designers Caitlin Lainoff (set), Jesse Garrison (video) and Pablo Santiago (lighting) as well as a host of dancers, writers and audiences who have participated in performances and workshops to generate material for the work. The Gnarwhallaby Quartet will premiere a new musical work by Wadle, titled Erasures and Additions.

Kristen Smiarowski is a Los Angeles-based choreographer and director whose projects investigate the relationship between performance and cultural memory. Her work has been performed nationally and internationally, and she has received awards and commissions from The Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists, Durfee Foundation, Music Center Education Division, Skirball Cultural Center, The University of California Institute for Research in the Arts, and The Wooden Floor, among others. Her work has been called “meditative” (Lewis Segal, The Los Angeles Times) and “raw....chilling in its unflinching simplicity” (Elizabeth Schwyzer, The Santa Barbara Independent). GROUNDSWELL, her environmental performance at Los Angeles’ Ballona Freshwater Marsh, was presented in the 2011 World Festival of Sacred Music.

The performative installation loops every hour.

Sleep, Staring, Well is supported, in part, through The Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists.