Mountains 2 is a co-production of Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, Torn Space Theater, UB Arts Collaboratory and MFA Alumnus Kyla Kegler, made possible through generous sponsorship from NYSCA and UB Arts Collaboratory.

About this event

Mountains is—

A metamodernist, transapocalyptic play about learning how to live while preparing to die. A post-species love-fest blurring fact & fantasy, art & therapy. 

Mountains is a play that Kyla Kegler developed the first iteration of in the summer of 2020, when all-things-pandemic were still novel. The original project was made with a group of 10 volunteer performers who rehearsed one time together, before taking a (literally blinded by the masks) leap of faith onto the Artpark amphitheater stage, and submitting themselves to my ruthless live-directing. The live-directing in this play functions both practically to tell the performers what to do and where to go, as well as conceptually, to narrate the fraught psychological and inter-creature relationships betwixt them. 

Mountains 2 is a continuation and expansion of the process we began in Mountains. It is a totally new play with a new cast using similar conceptual and practical tricks: an orgy of neurotic animals, task-based choreographies, unforgiving psychological diagnostics, and painfully nostalgic musical teasing. 

Through meta-modernistic frameworks of pop-psychology, self-help trends, mythology, fairy tales, culture and the news, Mountains 2 questions how the overwhelming "content" of our current cultural landscape impacts relationships to self and identity. In these live-directed durational big-head puppet shows, I explore the neuroses embedded within relationships, and the perpetual cycles of failure and success that govern our human experience of learning how to live while preparing to die. In a post-species love-fest blurring fact & fantasy, art & therapy, I situate this work in fictional paradigms to talk openly about real important feelings and to confuse the establishment of morality.