Field of Flesh

Chicago, 2024

We are all fundamentally delusional. Our consciousness makes us feel individual — special and separate from our environment. And yet we know we’re porous creatures who spray each other with spit particles, cultivate biomes in our gut, and can’t stop repeating words we learned on the internet. We navigate this dissonance by cultivating further delusions: ideological, narrative, consumptive, and so on.

Death is the ultimate release from delusion and dissonance. But for the living, death is nourishment. We pull the other inside ourselves for safekeeping and physically process the body as a way of mentally processing grief and impermanence.

We are always watching each other die – sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly. Someday we’ll all be nothing but dust and digital ghosts. But while we’re here, all stuck as actors in each other’s waking dreams, I’d like to toast to the pleasures of delusion, long may they last.

Devised & Performed by:

Nigel Brown

Carmia Imani

Mackenzie Jones

Katie Mazzini

Brian Shaw

Elijah Valter

Austin Winter

Assistant Director: Corin Wiggins

Set & Props: Gillian Butcher

Costumes: Kate Grube

Associate Producers: X. A. Li & Estlin Usher