Introduction

Concord Floral, written by Governor General’s Awardwinning playwright Jordan Tannahill, and co-created with acclaimed multidisciplinary artists Erin Brubacher and Cara Spooner, offers us a glimpse of what the future of performance might look like if it took seriously the emotional lives and searing insights of twenty-first century teens. An adaptation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s medieval allegory the Decameron, in which 10 youth take shelter in a villa to hide from the Black Death, the play unearths the dark memories, fears, and desires that swirl around an abandoned greenhouse, a suburban hangout that has become a place of refuge from an often inhospitable and bewildering adult world. The play is accompanied by This is my room. Look. by Erin Brubacher, a series of powerful photographic portraits originally installed with the theatre production. These photos extend our conception of where a performance begins and ends, of what visual, material, and disciplinary worlds a performance might be seen to contain. With an introduction by Laura Levin.