La Foresta Perduta—The Lost Forest

La Foresta Perduta is currently under development—see illustrations above. We are seeking funding from various arts orgnaizations and private donors.

La Foresta Perduta is an original interdisciplinary work challenging established western concepts of theatre, music, and dance, uniquely setting movement into the context of sculpture as stage. This work will investigate the cultural diversity of the multi-ethnic cast as they struggle to survive and ultimately to soar, reaching beyond judgments, beyond hatred and jealously, beyond the self to gain intuitive knowledge. The work focuses on the universal, primal need to transcend. Sound, movement, and objects empowered by association and infused with mystic meaning emerge as visions of the unknowable, the untouchable, the unheard and unspoken.

La Foresta Perduta stage space is constructed as an island approximately 45’ x 35’. The stage surface is topographical with natural rises to 8’ and falls to 3' across the surface.Clustered to one side of the island stage 75, 15’ to 20’x3”dia., aluminum poles are mounted vertically into stage set approximately 30” apart allowing performers to create gravity defying movement. The entire stage built on wheels is slowly rotating in a random pattern across the theatre box space.

The performance begins in darkness after the sun has set. A series of mirage like videos projection onto the stage and walls of the space surrounding the stage provide just enough light to make the performers visible, recognizable, then instantly gone. Lighting is critical to setting the mood of this work. Brady has repeatedly demonstrated through earlier work his mastery of light, preferring to use it as a painter might to control the message with clarify, intensity, and focus.

The cast is assembled on the island surface, a homogenous community of people.  As the progression continues the stage gradually splits into three separate islands. Drifting apart, each island rotates around the other and the performers now separated begin to evolve in unique and disparate ways. Each group learns to adapt to natural and manmade challenges and disasters, each developing their own cultural systems. La Foresta becomes a study of the evolving resultant cultures.  As they explore beyond their new world they encounter differences of color, class, religion resulting in conflict and distrust.  Each is a studied system based on history and anthropological precedent. (Concepts informed by artists independent research as well as inclusion of a Social Science Researcher.)

Performers will ultimately ascend as a crescendo of movement into the forest poles. They sway and, leap through and to the tops of the 15’ to 20’ poles in choreographed movement—a transcending moment.