Relay Room / [working titles] residency: Faust & Helene

The Relay Room Residency is a two-week developmental residency for performing artists working with technology. Choreographer and technologist Jace Weyant will be working on her dance and opera Faust & Helene.

The showing will last for approximately 30 minutes, followed by a reception, talkback, and opportunity to engage with the technology.

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Do we all know the story of Faust?

Anyways, the choice to transition from a man to a woman is, shall we say, under considerable moral scrutiny currently. To say I sold my soul to the devil to become a perverted facsimile of womanhood would be personally inaccurate but not far from a very popular way of viewing me. There is a bit of text from the libretto to Lili Boulanger's cantata "Faust et Helene" which translates from the original French to "I want to [experience], without any other concern, that pleasure which embodies in its very being the entire ideal of beauty." What if by this Faust means to say not that he wishes for Helene to be brought before him, but that he may become Helene in order to experience her? And what is left behind in this becoming? What of the residue of such transfiguration?In the final act of Goethe’s take on the legend of Faust, we hear a Chorus Mysticus as Faust is taken away to Heaven:

All that is transient
Is parable only:
The unattainable
Here becomes reality:
The indescribable,
Here is done:
Woman, eternal
Beckons us on.

That the unknowably divine is feminine is a knowledge, like that of the legend itself, which rejects Christianity while earnestly pretending to participate in it. And this alone is beautiful and strange enough to sing and dance about, but I am telling a different kind of story.

CREDITS:

Choreographed, Scored, Designed, and Programmed by Jace Weyant
Presented by Amanda + James
Orchestra:
Guitar - Christian Cail
Cello - Ceridwyn McCooey
Synth/Live Mixing - Sid Diamond
Costumes - Zo Roze
Chorus:Faust - Felix Bryan
Helene - Jace Weyant
Mephisto - Catheryn Clifford
Sophia - Zo Williams

For more information please visit - https://amandaplusjames.com/production/relay-room-residency-1

Event venue & nearby stays

3AM Theatre, 9-20 35th Avenue, Queens, United States

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