FEAST CYCLE
an interspecies (de)composition
FEAST CYCLE - An Interspecies (De)composition, premiered at Automata Arts on Friday July 12th, 2024, as part of Automata's TAPETAIL series, featuring Ashton Phillips joined by members of the Pure Filth Society ensemble, including founding member Dylan Ricards and new ensemble members: musician, broken-glass sculptor, and composer Sadie Robison and performance artist, bear-whispered, and experimental musician Eden/Tapsa/Lo Knutilla
Act 1 of the FEAST CYCLE built a plastic body of sound incorporating the sounds of creatures that can consume and metabolize pollution alongside the sounds of bodies and materials that have been nourished and transformed by these metamorphoses. Human performers will listen, hear, expand on, and respond to these more-than-human agencies, creating an interspecies web of plasticity and care to hold all the beings in the space. A movement-based performance will run simultaneously focusing on the plasticity of the performers’ body and its relationship to the other plastic bodies in the installation.
Act II of the FEAST CYCLE transformed the space into a partially darkened and partially illuminated chamber for connection with the subterranean realm of dirt, fungi, water, and metamorphosis. The Act featured an improvisational projection of myceliated water bubbling and flowing over fungal hyphae, breaking open into fields of egg tempera, spreading webs of connection as they eat and grow. The Pure Filth Ensemble performed a live score with this improvisational projection, becoming ground, fungi, and murky water, dripping with the possibility of opacity and repair.
“As Ashton asks, “what happens when we admit that all art is more-than-human and that nonhumans have a collaborative role to play in everything we do? That there is no realm of pure humanity that exists separate and apart from “nature”? That we are all animals, and microbes, and plastic, shifting form and metabolising each other?””
In the film Feast Cycle, the Pure Filth Society creates an interspecies web of instrumental sounds, field recordings, and amplified sounds of mealworms and beetles consuming styrofoam, transforming it into organic matter. Directed by Ashton Phillips, the performance features Sadie Greyduck (glass witch/composer), Eden Knutilla (performance artist), Dylan Ricards (electronics and percussion), and a colony of over 10,000 styrofoam-metabolizing mealworms.
