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It’s a busy time for award-winning director and media artist Lars Jan (Theater MFA 08) and his theater company Early Morning Opera.
After presenting A Suicide Bombing by Invitation Only, a live, multimedia performance/installation in Los Angeles last summer, the company staged its show, Abacus, at the Sundance Film Festival last week. The production now opens at REDCAT tonight (Feb. 2) with additional performances on Friday and Saturday evenings.
More about the production from REDCAT:
Lars Jan and his company Early Morning Opera employ the latest in high-tech wizardry to explore the seductive power of multimedia persuasion, including TED-style presentations and video-enhanced megachurch events. Abacus introduces media visionary and cult icon Paul Abacus, who is given a platform to expound on such theories as a re-imagining of Buckminster Fuller’s fabled Geoscope as a new “data cathedral” for the masses and a call for a world without national borders.
The visually immersive production incorporates the use of live video Steadicams and large-scale projections in order to magnify Paul Abacus, who is part pitchman and part preacher. The production was first staged at REDCAT’s New Original Works Festival in July 2009.
Jan, who is a 2011 TEDGobal Fellow, discusses his motivation behind the project in a Nov. 2011 Fellows Friday interview with TED:
One of the things Abacus is about is increasing visual literacy so that people are better able to discern good content from bad, and truths from fiction or propaganda more easily.
Read the 2010 24700 interview with Jan about his work here.
Early Morning Opera: ‘Abacus’
REDCAT
Thursday & Friday, Feb. 2-3, 8:30 pm
Tickets: General $20, Students $16 , CalArts Community $10
Saturday, Feb. 4, 8:30 pm
Tickets: General $25, Students $20 , CalArts Community $12