Gray Area Grand Theater: The Memory Theaters of Claudia Hart

Gray Area is pleased to present ‘The Memory Theaters of Claudia Hart,’ performed with Tommy Martinez. Join us at 6PM for Happy Hour, followed by a seated performance at 7PM as well as a reception afterwards.

In the Memory Theaters, Claudia Hart recites personal fables that hybrid Grimm’s fairy tales with ghost stories and Gothic fiction, to create a haunting narrative about a digital artist trying to find her way in the alienating culture of high-end technologies. Hers is a world obsessed with the cult of innovation, invested in eternal newness but otherwise an extension of a larger artworld where power, money, status, and adherence to a narrow insider code of ethics and behavior dominate. Estranged from the futuristic and success-driven world in which she finds herself, the Memory Theaters track Hart’s transformation of life into art, reflecting on generational trauma and her own psychological dissonance as she navigates the harsh political realities of the contemporary art world. Hart tells her stories against a backdrop of her projected 3D animations, while Martinez plays electric guitar. His dark and haunting music is rehearsed but improvised upon and processed live, setting the pace and mood of this powerfully emotional theatrical narrative.

The Memory Theater of Claudia Hart (2023-2024), transforms the contents of her archives into a new work. In the tradition of the Wooster Group, Hart’s Memory Theater takes the form of a 40-minute theatrical monologue combined with animations that include experimental avatar dance, 3D animation and video recordings of live performances, initially produced for The Alices Virtual-Reality Ballet, a collaboration between Claudia Hart and Edmund Campion that took place over the course of seven years between 2013 and 2020. One of the many iterations of this work was a live Virtual Reality version, produced in 2018 by Tommy Martinez, in a Tech Residency at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY. This summer, Hart and Martinez have returned to this earlier piece in order to rework it in relation to the public politics of 2024.

‘The Memory Theaters of Claudia Hart’ is based on The Alices Virtual-Reality Ballet, a collaboration by Claudia Hart and Edmund Campion, taking place over the course of seven years, between 2013 and 2020.

Written by Claudia Hart, 2022-2023 and rewritten in collaboration with Tommy Martinez in 2024.

Live Music Composed and Performed by Tommy Martinez.

Remixing, sound, and software produced by Edmund Campion, 2014-2024.

Event Production by Andrew Blanton.