Death in Silhouette

Miah Persson and Roderick Williams in Blank Out, Dutch National Opera, adapted by Park Avenue Armory. Photo: Stephanie Berger.

There’s an app for that? While this tech idiom might seem out of place in a performance meditating on death and mortality, Mementos Mori—a recent work by the Chicago-based performance collective Manual Cinema—spins a darkly comic web centered on a figure of death who trades in her scythe for a smartphone. Mimicking the ubiquitous personal technologies available that help us to accomplish quotidian tasks and pass the time, reaping becomes as simple as swiping left or right in the sardonically-named “reapr” app. In the production, the dulcet sounds of death’s ringtone create a kind of leitmotif throughout this whimsical yet profound piece, serving to remind audiences that death is always on call.

Manual Cinema is a not only a performance collective, but also a design studio and film production company, founded in 2010 to create “immersive stories for stage and screen.” In addition to full-length performances, the company has also worked in the areas of contemporary dance, site-specific performance, music video, and short film. Their work has been exhibited in collaboration with the Chicago History Museum and Chicago Q Ensemble String Quartet, among many other award-winning projects.

As their name suggests, Manual Cinema primarily develops live cinematic puppet shows exceedingly intricate in design, creating real-time animations through a nearly seamless manipulation of human and object silhouettes into filmic sequences that take on a surreal, dreamlike quality in performance. Utilizing the antiquated technology of overhead projectors and hundreds of paper puppets layered across multiple screen displays, actor-puppeteers manipulate the screen images on stage with the use of multiple camera angles enhanced by a haunting lighting and sound design.

First premiered in 2015, Mementos Mori is the fifth full-length production in the company’s repertoire and the first to appear in BAM’s Next Wave Festival. The collective previously garnered a name for itself in New York with two performances: ADA/AVA at 3LD in 2015 and Lula Del Ray at the 2016 Under the Radar Festival. But it is not just quirky narratives and off-beat characters that keep audiences enamored with their work; it is their innovative, virtuosic style of mixed-media performance and puppetry that defies conventional genre, integrating forms such as shadow puppetry, mime, music, cinema, and live theatre to tell fantastical stories on universal topics such as death, aging, and love.

In Mementos Mori, death appears in female form meeting a number of strangers going about everyday activities: driving cars, riding bikes, smoking cigarettes, staring out windows, watching the clock. With little time to learn about these outer figures, her appearance proves fatal and they meet their (sometimes untimely) ends. This pattern continues until she encounters an old woman who cheats death by challenging her to a game of chess, which the old woman wins. During their game, death’s phone is switched out of her cloak pocket for another by the old woman’s grandchild who unwittingly discovers the dangerous power it yields. Unable to find her device, death is forced to take an unexpected holiday.

Humorous newspaper headlines flash across the screen: “Plane Crashes, Everyone Survives.” “No Obituaries.” “Is Death on Holiday?” Incapable of performing her duties without her reapr app, death seeks more human comforts and falls in love with a man whose life she was supposed to have taken—an elderly projectionist recently let go from a newly digitized cinema. Indeed, the failures and consequences of new technology are continuously highlighted throughout the production with the use of outmoded machinery. Interweaving various narrative threads together, the performance features characters whose stories intersect over time.

The performance features three screens, six puppeteers, seven overhead projectors, two cameras, masks and costumes (to enhance silhouettes), a chamber ensemble (flute, cello, guitar...