From Marketing intern Cortney…

Today I got the chance to sit in on the rehearsal for Cynthia Hopkins’ final installation of her Accinosco Trilogy. The performance is going to be so rad. This segment, entitled The Success of Failure (Or The Failure of Success), follows the same thematic content of the first two performances, but takes the execution of those elements to the utmost extreme. In a conversation with the interns today, Cynthia explained that her performances interweave truths from her research and actual events with fictions she has created to compliment her explorations into memory and amnesia.  The truth and the fiction in The Success of Failure (Or The Failure of Success) are pushed to their built up and stripped down limits, resulting in a high energy, high contrast romp through Cynthia’s process and personal experiences.

The show opens with a conversation between two Orb Speakers, round silver beings with Pac Man mouths and excellent vocabularies. One is presumably the older, wiser Orb Speaker telling an epic tale to a curious younger Orb Speaker who bobs around the narrator in excitement.  The story of the great battle for the future of earth and the universe unfolds on stage as the Orb Speaker tells it. The earthlings in this epic tale are distant relatives of humans who are still paying for the grievous mistakes made by their grandparent species, and their earth is threatened by an unfriendly race of aliens. We are introduced to Ruom, a hard drinking warrior space pilot, who struggles with whether or not to save the earth as it might not be worth saving anymore.  We meet the high council of this civilization as they sing Ruom’s orders—in captivating and bouncy harmonies—before sending their warrior slingshotting through space to confront their attackers. And that is all in the first 15 minutes.

Cynthia Hopkins’ haunting bell-clear singing voice alone is reason to see this show.  But the full experience of the epic tale is a unique theater performance not to be missed.  In onstage collaboration with Jim Findlay and Jeff Suggs, the tech in the production becomes a character itself, and the tech people, Findlay and Suggs, lend their dance moves and singing voices to the tale as needed. Cynthia interacts with her live crew members, as well as other characters projected on various screens around the stage. Live footage of Ruom’s face and an enormous undulating projection screen create fractured distortion of the presented images, along with the sense of a constant watchful eye over the entire show.  The transparency of the technological process and the mixing of high and low tech for special effects make Cynthia’s performance more than just a theater production, but a workshop on how to push the boundaries of theatrical performance and creative collaboration.

The second half of The Success of Failure (Or The Failure of Success) takes on a completely different tone.  Stripped of the tech, sets and even costumes, Cynthia speaks about the real situations that led her on the journey that spawned the Accinosco Trilogy. As Ruom’s saga takes fiction to its outermost bounds, Cynthia’s straightforward and honest conversation becomes the paradigm for truth in the trilogy. In this performance we are privileged to witness this multi-talented composer/singer/actress wearing many hats (space helmets?) and the result is a wondrous, sonorous journey through both the outer space of imagination and the inner space of self exploration.

See what I mean? Cynthia Hopkins is SUPER RAD.

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