A DEEP SPACE PERFORMANCE RESIDENCY
CAROL’s Disaster Theater | Photo by Ashley Smith
SCREAM DYNAMO SCREAM DYNAMO SCREAM
a work in progress by CAROL performance group
In SCREAM DYNAMO SCREAM DYNAMO SCREAM a girl discovers she's a chatbot. A boy commits a sacrifice in the name of electricity. A child tries to speak the language of God. And the datacenter keeps getting bigger and bigger.
Synopsis
Between 1927 and 1929, Eugene O'Neil attempted to write a play concerning humankind's loss of spirituality in the wake of rapid technological progress. He called it Dynamo. The play was terribly reviewed and ultimately failed at reaching the promise of its premise. In SCREAM DYNAMO SCREAM DYNAMO SCREAM, CAROL performance group revisits this text and brings it into the age of A.I. They deconstruct its elements, scraping it for data in the mode of a large language model, to understand what Eugene was attempting to say. Ultimately reduced to a series of algorithms, the performance turns into a mash-up of movement opera, nonsense poems, and collaged images. Incorporating influences from The Legend of Kaspar Hauser, the writings of Ray Kurzweil, and science-fiction B-Movies, the piece questions whether humanity can successfully separate itself from technology and, if not, should we all stop fighting the inevitable and start thinking, acting, and performing like the machines?
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
CAROL is a Brooklyn-based performance group led by the creative duo of Skye Fort and Mike Steele. Alongside a rotating team of collaborators, they create new works of experimental theatre that face hard truths with humor, poetry, and an embrace of the bizarre.
“We draw on classical myths, government documents, religious doctrines, popular films, corny b-movies, philosophy, internet artifacts, diaries, original plays, and more. Our collage aesthetic combines these into new constructions that mirror the modern experience of the overloaded information age. We utilize a combination of theatrical forms, performance art, dance, video, soundscape, and sculpture. Our work is effortful, usually leaves the stage a mess, and has historically included molded gelatin, frenzied dance numbers, and monologues about mutant dogs.”
MIKE STEELE (Lead Artist/Director) is a Brooklyn-based theatre artist, with ties to Chicago and Austin. He is a co-leader of CAROL performance group, with whom he recently created two full-length works based on his scripts: Disaster Theater (The Brick, NYC; Cannonball Festival, Philly) and To Bridge Ten Millennia (Exponential Festival, NYC). Other directorial credits include This is a Rehearsal (Theatre For One, Chicago/NYC) The Killer by Ionesco (Trap Door Theatre, Chicago, 3 Jeff-Award Nominations), and Lear by Young Jean Lee (The Crashbox, Austin). Mike holds a MFA from UT Austin. His work has been supported by The Mercury Store, The Brooklyn Arts Council, Indiespace, and Links Hall, to name a few.
SKYE FORT (Lead Artist/Devisor/Director & Video Designer) is a multi-disciplinary artist originally from New Mexico and currently in Philadelphia, having spent time in Chicago and Baltimore in between. Her practice includes theatre, video, performance, installation, and general mess-making. Her most recent production Disaster Theater premiered at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn, NY in 2024 before touring to Cannonball Festival in Philadelphia. Other directing credits include Twelfth Night (Assistant Director, Dir Yury Urnov, The Wilma, 2023), What If (Trap Door Theatre, 2022), And Away We Stared (Trap Door Theatre, 2021), Strange As It Seems (Tricklock Theatre, 2019), and Childhood Beauty (Trap Door Theatre, 2019). Skye’s video work has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington and Collar Works Gallery in Troy, NY. Her installations “Queer. Futures. Past.” and “Could Have Been/Someone” were both shown in Baltimore, MD. Skye is a co-founder of CAROL Performance Group and a producer with Cannonball Festival. She holds a B.A. in acting from the University of New Mexico, and an M.F.A. in Theatre Arts from Towson University.