Artist
Myra Bazell

Project Title
Ghosts and Other Guests (GOG)

Grant Amount
$1,000

Project Description

Ghost and Other Guests (GOG) is a dance-theater piece about vulnerability and exploitation within online virtual communities and social media networks. Created by SCRAP Performance Group under the Artistic Direction of Choreographer Myra Bazell, this work is a triptych for five dancers and a drone, set in a raw industrial space in Atlanta. Other project elements include wearable technology, live stream video mapping, original music, and lighting design.

GOG is set in concentric environments that reveal how image capture and cyber-broadcast platforms serve to both inform us and exploit us. The creative team is interested in the idea that humans create products that inevitably may harm us. There is extensive research on the impact of social media on young women, which focuses on the risk of kidnapping into sex trade slavery. While GOG is not a piece about Human Trafficking there are threads woven through the piece that spark awareness of this contemporary pandemic. The dancers who are co-creating GOG with SCRAP have shed light on what it’s like to be a young woman caught between two identities; one that is maintained for public consumption, and the true authentic self. GOG is an inquiry into how we reconcile the difference between what we put out into the world and who we really are.