Meghan Zimbler
Staff Writer
Springfield College’s Visual and Performing Arts Department is putting its finishing touches on the upcoming original show, How to Survive the Grey Goo.
The performers have some ambitious ideas in place, a combination of a live action and recorded material, creating an interactive show for the audience to view.
Technical activity is definitely a big part of the show and has made advances over the last few weeks.
“That’s gone well. We still have bugs to work out, and it’s always like that…it’s on track,” said Martin Shell, the chair of the visual and performing arts department.
Shell is the director of the show, along with Cynthia Nazzaro, a professor of Dance. There are many other professors involved in the production, helping with graphics, music and costumes. The show is going to be performed by 23 students from the InterArts workshop class, which is a collaborative course.
Twenty of these students are the performers and authors of the show, and Grey Goo is the main project of the class. The other three are stage production students who run the lights, sound and technical work.
This is the first time the InterArts workshop has run in eight years.
When the March 7 edition of The Student came out, the production was just forming all of its ideas for what was to come. Since then, Shell states that the dances and choreography have come a long way, as well as the music itself.
“You have a project that has to weave together a lot of different kinds of [performance] sequences,” Shell said.
If you don’t know what Grey Goo is, it comes from nanotechnology in which robots could be made in the size of molecules. If they were able to reproduce themselves, like an organism, nothing would be able to stop them. Metaphorically, artists have stated the world is being drowned by “too much digital stuff” and we are being covered in the “Grey Goo.”
“We feel that is not yet the case. We feel that there is plenty of room to play and explore with digital art that keeps humanity at the forefront,” Shell said.
This is a completely original show and the ideas all stemmed from interests of students. They have done other kinds of science fiction projects before, but Shell regards this one as more “addressing the times.”
“We’re branching off of pretty common knowledge,” Shell stated. “The stories you will hear are real, true life stories…some of the stories are directly the stories of people in the course.”
So what is in store for How to Survive Grey Goo? A lot of technical activity, original music, dances and comic skits, with some improvisations.
Everyone in the show has been working hard these last few weeks to get this production done.
The performers take the main stage in the Fuller Arts Center at 8 p.m. tonight. The production will go on for four nights, ending on Sunday, Aril 7 with a matinee at 2 p.m.
Everyone is excited, but long hours rehearsing have really brought everything together.
If you think you are drowning in today’s technology, you should definitely check out How to Survive Grey Goo.