ALARM

We conceived ALARM while living in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, where nightly we experienced a security alarm from a nearby building. Its violent disruption inspired our initial exploration of the sonic character of alarms and the physical response they create. Since, the project has become for us a questioning of boundaries, ownership and power as observed both locally and in the geopolitical scene—Alarm performs ideas of need, limit and transgression in the context of capitalist society, with its crises of inequality. The alarm, as a public performance of danger, sets an example for the violating body and its desire to disrupt and renegotiate the limits of its existence. Once it sounds, the divisions between self and other, between public and private, previously hidden in the background, are revealed, as are the networks and infrastructures protecting those boundaries. Amidst the city’s viscera concealing systems of protection, fear and power in infinite webs of wires and cables, Alarm implicates us in questions of difference, desire, and law. An alarm in and of itself, this project attempts to examine the right to own land, while voicing our unease at witnessing the rapid gentrification of a struggling neighborhood, and contemplates freedom of movement in the face of migration and rising nationalist tendencies.

Watch: REDCAT 2017 Campaign Trailer

Performances:

REDCAT Studio, Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater, Los Angeles (2017)

Blue Roof Studios, Los Angeles, presented by LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) (2018)

Direction: Kestrel Leah

Music composition & sound design: Yiannis Christofides

Choreography: Brigette Dunn-Korpela

Visual design: Dasha Sur

Costume design: David Moyer

Lighting Design: Katelan Braymer

Video Design (REDCAT): Hsuan-Kuang Hsieh

Cast: Joseph Baca, Bailey Edwards, Cristina Fernandez, Marguerite French, Craig Gibson, Sadie Kuwano, Kestrel Leah, Dominique McDougal, Lisa McNeely, Anthony Nikolchev, Nathan Nonhof, Lizi Watt, Jenapher Zheng