Creative Capital

Description

Last Meadow is an evening-length, three-part piece for three performers that mines movements and texts from James Dean’s three films to create a non-narrative patchwork that describes an America where the jig is up and the dream has died. The piece exploits the iconic and inherently misunderstood image of James Dean as a symbol of the ways in which we project unrealistic and outsized expectations onto each other and onto our identity as a nation. In agriculture, the “last meadow” is the one that receives the least amount of water from irrigation. In neurology, “last meadow” describes a kind of stroke in which the brain doesn’t receive enough blood thereby causing damage. Last Meadow is about the space of waiting, where what you need never comes. Performance artist Neal Medlyn is creating music for Last Meadow and visual artist Paul Chan will serve as dramaturg.