Syzygy: 

Syzygy is the combination of two metrical feet into a single unit. Carl Jung used it to mean a union of opposites. Here, Syzygy, is a site-specific interactive performance that happened on the S shuttle train,  directed by Jiaoyang Li. It was performed by 16 actors, and produced as part of the Unlimited Body Project at the Performa biennial 2019 in New York City. It is about Anthropocene, ecological, and environmental problems, and accelerate socialist. Here we invited the performers in our workshop to meditate on the relationship between human and the earth by moving our bodies collectively on the S shuttle trains, imaging one as a piece of plastic(plastic bottle, plastic cup, plastic box…) that will damage, or somehow affect the nature—— which embodied by the shuttle train and the commute strangers. The performance flows with the designed soundtrack “My Anthropocentric Heart”, mixed with Steve Reich's "Fastest Train in" New York”, TS Eliot’s poems "The Hollow Man" and "The Waste Land”, Anne Waldman’s spoken word, and the collected oral testimonies by community members. It is a chanting of dilemma, we urban lives, how do the breathing we live on, are already damaging other species. It is a community-based project, with poetry, oral history, immersive ambient performance, moving sculpture, and interactive elements.

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Lead:Jiaoyang Li 

Actors: Zhiwu Wu

Sound design: Consuela Sufei Yang