ORBIT

February 9th-19th, 2017 

Billy Wilder Theater at the Whitney Museum of American Art 

10 Consecutive Earth Days 

For 10-consecutive days, performers Amapola Prada, Elizabeth Sonnenburg,  and I lived enclosed in the narrow space between the windowpanes of the Whitney Museum’s theater. Our environment partially emulated those of simulation experiments conducted by astronauts preparing to live on another planet, like Mars. In an effort “to test a sustainable equation”, we collected our urine in jars, excrement in composting buckets, and grey water in 5-gallon jugs. We presented the total contents of this waste to an audience on our last day in a performance titled “Assembly”. Orbit was viewed during museum open hours with 24hr viewing from the street. In addition to daily routines of preparing food, cleaning, changing water supply, Orbit prioritized exercises- physical and esoteric- that complimented our agenda to shift colonizing behavior stored within each of us as participants in this experiment I called “real theater”. Three time structures were followed in “Orbit”: 24hr Earth day, ISS clock, and Climax clock. Climax clock designated 5-7 times per Earth day for “climaxes” to occur in “Orbit”, in which the three Orbiters were self-directed to increase the intensity of a felt emotion, or push a surreality of the moment that the climax occurred. Light changes corresponded with the climax times to cue the Orbiters, with the climax clock listed throughout the museum and on the museum’s website.