Life and Times – Episode 1

Life is a musical. Live music, movement and songs unite to form a musical play in the style of communist mass spectacles in the first part of the saga of Kristin Worrall’s early childhood. In “Life and Times – Episode 1”, a co-production with the Burgtheater in Vienna with which Nature Theater of Oklahoma were invitedto the Theatertreffen in 2010, the New York group melds their love of conceptual art with playful melodies and angular, clumsy group choreographies to form an extraordinary epic about an ordinary life. Without a single spoken word, the performers sing and dance through Worrall’s memories of the time around her birth in the mid-70s to when she was eight years old, and while doing so, they lend as much weight to every “um” and “ah” and “I was like …” as to all the other words. The optimistic beats on the ukulele mould the soundtrack to images and moments from the memoirs of an average middle-class, American girl – the favourite toy she couldn’t live without, the yellow and gold bedroom, the first, second and third best friend, the sister who never wore shoes. These moments are a universal space for our own memories of stories, joys, hopes and childhood embarrassments.