BADrum

An ornithologist lays dying and hallucinates his way through his repertoire of knowledge. His end of life care nurse harbors dreams of being an horse racing jockey as she tends to his ailing body. Meanwhile, the ornithologist’s wife, desperate to avoid the reality of the situation, spends all her time in the bath, hiding.  

BADrum is a dance theater work exploring traumatic memory, voyeurism, privacy and the social codes of a decaying domestic space. Fragments accumulate - BADrum wonders how memory is kept alive; what carries through from before, how the traces live in our bodies and what ails us in an empty room. 

Inspired by the poetry of Marie Howe and William Carlos Williams; writings on PTSD by Bessel van der Kolk, the films of Roy Andersson; the Icarus myth; ornithology and object theory. BADrum seeks to investigate the terrible privacy we all carry with us.

Presented at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center in 2015. 
Performers: Emily Reilly, Stephanie Hayes, Tanya Marquardt and Jack Moran. 
Contributing artist: Masha Tsimring, Laura Bernstein and Michael McQuilken