Bitef

PAVOL LISKA & KELLY COPPER

NATURE THEATER OF OKLAHOMA, NEW YORK, USA

LIFE AND TIMES - EPISODE 1

200'

A musical based on the life story of one of their own company members, Life and Times is the last in a series of works which were all generated from recorded telephone conversations. Using a verbatim transcript of the over 16 hours of recorded audio as libretto, the company have, with heroic effort, created their first original musical extravaganza - the tale generated from the single simple question, asked of a friend: "can you tell me your life story?"

Far from resembling the traditional arching narrative with dramatic structure and tension, the source text for Life and Times resembles instead a patchwork quilt or spider's web - the wanderings and digressions of a single person considering the entirety of their whole life. Filled with simple moments of insight, flashes of half-forgotten friends, the subject of this musical saga stops her life to consider all the moments that made her who she is. Since her life is quite normal and unexceptional, her story contains many bits of our own. You remember the toy you couldn’t live without

- the next door neighbor who had a better house - a father who was mysteriously quiet - the friend whose mother let you stay up all night - the grandmother who served tea with honey in the good china cups - the sister who never wore shoes... It is a portrait of an unremarkable life, an epic narrative along the lines of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past - a deep map of memory which takes us on a subterranean plunge into the layers of our own forgotten history.

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