Second Season: Tom in the Machine and My Devil Dance

Second Season: Tom in the Machine and My Devil Dance

January 29 & 30, 2016
Tom in the Machine

Event Attributes

Tom in the Machine
by Matthew Reeves

Tom in the Machine, a new dance-theatre show parallels the allegory of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath to modern day challenges felt inside the American workforce. What are the great social divides of today? How do we represent the Haves and the Have-Nots? What is majestic still about the American spirit and what stirs our human dignity? When is it the powerful versus the powerless?

My Devil Dance
by Sudesh Mantillake

Colonizers labeled ritual dance of Sri Lanka as “devil dance”. Subsequently, it was commodified and brought to Europe as part of “colonial exhibition”. Colonial exhibitions exposed Sri Lankan dancers as exotic creatures along with animals brought from different parts of the world. This piece tries to capture some oppressions that Sri Lankans and other colonized nations had gone through. The piece proposes “mindfulness” for co-existence of humans, while acknowledging personal and cultural histories of oppressive events in the past.