Wabash College Visiting Artists Series presents The End of TV by Manual Cinema. The program takes place at 8 p.m. Friday in Ball Theater, in the Fine Arts Center.
Manual Cinema uses vintage overhead projectors, puppets, actors, live-feed cameras, a live music ensemble and original screenplays to transform the experience of attending the movies into an immersive category defying live film event. Then, at the end of the show, the audience is invited onstage to see the equipment and puppetry and explore how the complex production is made.
“The End of TV” is set in a post-industrial Rust Belt city in the 1990s and told through a collection of original 70’s R&B-inspired art pop songs, The End of TV explores the quest to find meaning amongst the increasingly constant barrage of commercial images and advertising white-noise. Two sides of the American Dream — its technicolor promise as delivered through TV ads, and its failure, witnessed in the dark reality of industrial decline — are staged in cinematic shadow puppetry and lo-fi live video feeds with flat paper renderings of commercial products. The show is driven by a sweeping chamber art pop song cycle performed live by a five-piece band.
Tickets are free, but are required for Visiting Artist Series events. Reserve your tickets online at www.wabash.edu/boxoffice. If not sold out, tickets will also be available at the box office window.
Prior to the performance Manual Cinema will hold a hands-on workshop that is free and open to the public 3–5 p.m. Friday Space is limited. Reservations are required. To reserve a space in the workshop email stradera@wabash.edu.
The Wabash College Visiting Artist Series is funded in part by the Tippecanoe Arts Federation, the Indiana Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
