Curators: Taylor Black, Peter Burke, Shawn Chua, Eero Laine, and Rumen Rachev with additional video and audio by Milton Lim
Performers and artists: Denise Ackerl, Taylor Black, Kathryn Blair, Peter Burke, Michelle Liu Carriger, Sarah Crews, the Future Advisory Board (Azadeh Sharifi, Natalia Ensling, Areum Jeong, Asher Warren, Simo Kellokumpu, Anna Kimmel, Yiota Demetriou), Petra Kuppers, Eero Laine, Solomon Lennox, Colin Tucker
Performance Studies international Conference
University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada
July 7, 2019
ElastiCity was a pop-up theme park presenting an immersive research experience that performs the elastic boundaries be-tween fantasy and disappointment, wonder and boredom, pleasures and apathy. The theme park stretches between the fantastic and the mundane to consider the networks and spans of relations among performers, spectators, and de-signed spaces and objects. Our attractions mix reality and simulacra, enact worlds, explore economies of attention and nostalgia, perform labour, and reframe fun in order to ask how might we view theme parks’ capacity to simultaneously stretch and compress themselves as an activation of new forms of affec-tive economies, social relations, and labour practices?
Eero Laine 