The Forever Project is a multidisciplinary work by Peggy Piacenza that utilizes video-installation, archival materials, and live performance to explore the non-linear, fragmented construction of identity, and the internal/external relationship of the self in connection with others.
Piacenza’s 30-year professional performance career and her history as a sex worker become an embodied tapestry of artistic material, a thematic entanglement of sex-labor, the pursuit of freedom, and ageism. Piacenza’s personal and artistic movement archives are deconstructed and exaggerated with dark humor through a satirical ecofeminism lens, in a quest to answer how we find connection with others while undergoing the never-ending project of self-growth and the search for purpose.
In
The Forever Project, larger-than-life characters, originally performed by Piacenza in works created and directed by Dayna Hanson—
Gloria’s Cause,
Improvement Club and
The Clay Duke.
—are embodied within a single identity, combined with personal lived experience, and reimagined to explore touch, ironies of capitalism and labor, and tensions between safety and materialism.
The performance-installation occurs inside a cube-shaped set, in which audiences are immersed with images and dancing. A quiet, disturbing world builds slowly, as performers move through space and videos are projected on surrounding screens.
Within The Forever Project, the body emerges as a container for the sacred and profane, a site for memoir and fiction to coalesce, as the blurred lines between the real and artificial are explored.
The Forever Project will premiere January 18–24, 2024, at On The Boards, Seattle, WA. Joining Piacenza will be dance artists Amelia Reeber and Julia Sloane.
The project has received generous residency support from On The Boards and Base in Seattle.
Learn More: https://peggy-piacenza.com/