the decameron / san francisco, usa + outokumpu, finland

A PLAGUE + A SHOW FROM LONG AGO

The Decameron, directed by Karl Gillick, is a reimagining of Giovanni Boccaccio’s famous spectacle of the same name, originally conceived and written during the Black Plague of 1358 by seven women and three men as they took refuge from the epidemic in a small villa in Florence, Italy. Gillick’s version borrows the original’s structure—ten nights of stories with ten stories per night, each with a unique, humanistic theme—and populates it with performances from artists from across the globe. For each night, a different artist is selected as king or queen, presiding over the festivities and guiding the audience as they travel from act to act, each of which is a site specific creation, some of which are rehearsed far in advance while others are invented on the spot or the evening before.

ACROSS THE EARTH AND DOWN BELOW

The San Francisco performance took place at the Fort Mason Firehouse, inside the abandoned structure on the edge of the bay and out over the bay itself. My Uncanny Valley Orphanage was installed in one of the firehouse’s rooms for all ten nights, I performed a selection of my poems for three, and was selected as king for the third night. As a result of my performances, I was hired to help with story design for the FInland show which took place in an abandoned copper mine in the rural town of Outokumpu in February of 2017 as part of a nationwide celebration of the country’s 100th year of independence. 100 stories for 100 years. I was king for the first evening’s show and invented a new performance each night, both solo and in collaboration with other artists, of which we had 38 participating from FInland, Sweden, Iceland, Russia, Denmark, Spain and the United States. I also was invited by Odd Dance, our Russian butoh troop, to join them in their largely improvised, half-naked outdoor performance for evening seven, which had us standing in buckets of water in the -30 degree winter air with pig spines lashed to our backs. For the final performance of the final night, I directed the audience itself in a ten minute improvised abstract musical featuring a rain storm, a crowded city street, giant umbrellas and a sing-along closing number.