Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016

Easternsports is an immersive environment of color, light, scent, music, spoken word, and videos. The installation is a collaboration between Alex Da Corte, who created the sets, costumes, and videos, and Jayson Musson, who wrote the script, with a haunting score by the composer Devonté Hynes.

Within the stagelike installation, the videos present a vignette-driven update of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town, with allegorical references to the city of Philadelphia, where both artists have lived for many years. Da Corte built the video sets entirely by hand and filmed the action at half speed, creating a dreamlike space punctuated by Musson’s incisive, poetic text. The colorful sets and the robotic exaggeration of the performers’ movements evoke both Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet, also on view in this exhibition, and the exuberance of Philadelphia’s mummer tradition, in which costumed entertainers welcome in the New Year with a parade.