dThe Undone, Do It

Leah Crosby – Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design

Collaborator: Connor Singh VanderBeek – School of Music, Theatre & Dance;

This project combines performance, creative non-fiction writing, repurposing old technology, sound design, audio engineering, and sculpture. The arts play a central role in this project, which uses old and new technology (a vintage telephone switchboard, a series of cassette tapes and decks, a laptop) to creatively express a narrative.

This performance will premiere in a test version during the fourth week of the winter semester at the Faculty and Graduate studios at Green Road. This test will inform a larger work that will premiere at the end of year MFA First Year show at Green Road, which is free and open to the public. Singh and I will continue to work with each of our departments to imagine alternative spaces to continue to share this work as it develops. The impact on campus is to provide students, faculty, and community members with a novel performance experience that is designed to be participatory and to encourage personal reflection about their own relationships with loss, memory, and regret in a time of such massive loss of so many events, lives, and opportunities due to COVID deaths and cancellations.

The Undone: Do It is a telephone-based choose your own adventure story that explores the desire to redo past choices in the wake of the loss of a life. This interactive audio story can be accessed at any time by calling 734-470-3648 and usually takes 15-45 minutes, depending on your choices and desires.

While you can call the telephone line from anywhere, the photographs below represent a series of constructed listening booths that provided a quiet, isolated space to move through the audio experience. These booths were created to be reminiscent of telephone booths, voting booths, and bathroom stalls.

This project was supported by the Stamps School of Art and Design and ArtsEngine.