
Created by Manual Cinema
Hands dance across seven vintage overhead projectors, moving tiny paper birds through a cellophane sky. Combining analog craftsmanship and digital dexterity, the Chicago-based performance collective Manual Cinema engineers a live movie before the audience’s eyes in Mementos Mori, a meditation on death and ephemerality. Integrating actors, props, two cameras, three screens, a live score for chamber ensemble and electronics, and hundreds of paper shadow puppets, this miracle of joyful cine-nostalgia follows Death as she washes up on the California shore, trades her scythe for an iPhone app, and wanders Hollywood, swiping loss and unexpected connection into the otherwise disparate lives of a ghost, a seven-year-old girl, and an elderly projectionist.
Directed by Julia Miller
Puppet design by Drew Dir
Choreography by Sarah Fornace
Music and sound design by Kyle Vegter
Costume design by Mieka van der Ploeg