Magic Back to Town
The show is set in a 19th-century theater — Connelly Theater in the east village. It’s a place where people still light up the 'ghost light' every night after the show, protecting the theater from phantoms in the darkness.
The program is developed as a set of synchronized theatrical performances. Moon Riba and Closca's dance piece The Earth Beat explored how technology could connect us and interact with our natural surroundings, highlighting the unpredictability of nature and its overwhelming force, making humans powerless and vulnerable.
Her Waiting Earthquake performed the real-time earthquake waiting process, live-sonic accompanied by Emilie Weibel and Jason Nazary.
Moon Ribas, an avant-garde cyborg artist/dancer from Barcelona, has implanted a magnetic sensor in her elbow that is connected to seismic meters, allowing her to feel the earthquakes in real-time.
Since the beginning of the project, we have collected human audio stories about their feelings of disconnection and thoughts of magic. These narratives have been transposed into live-improvisations on the scene by musicians Emilie Weibel and Jason Nazary. Audiences immediately entered a sonic landscape where stories were told in multiple languages. Moon Ribas joint another force as she turned on the magnet in her elbow, waiting for real-time earthquakes. The perceived seismic data got synced with human acoustic soundwaves, live-remixing by the musician.