Chloe Veltman | SF Weekly | July 2006

Combining live and recorded music, choreography, spoken text, video projections, televised images, and an interactive set, Erika Shuch Performance Project's latest, and very beautiful, movement theater piece is all about humanity's frenzied and largely frustrated attempts to forge connections with worlds beyond our own. References to scientific principles — from the mnemonic used by astronomers to remember the arrangement of stars according to particular spectral characteristics to the RGB color model — are batted about on stage like the pixilated ball in a game of Pong. But like this early computer game, most of the show's scientific content is goofily low-tech. As references to Ridley Scott's 1979 movie, Alien, and Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) suggest, the world of science-fiction fantasy is a more powerful means for forging links with the cosmos than empirical science. Just as two lovers, portrayed by Danny Wolohan and Erika Chong Shuch (who also choreographs and directs), orbit around each other, rarely able to bond, the production reveals humanity's frenzied and largely frustrated attempts to forge connections with those we love most.

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