We are very excited to announce the premiere of The Glory Machine by Billy Mullaney, associate artist at TILT, at Veem House for Performance on 1 April 2022.
Try out: 31 March 2022 - 20.00 hrs
Premiere: 1 April 2022 - 20.00 hrs
2 April 2022, 20.00 hrs
Veem House for Performance, Amsterdam
The Glory Machine is a theatre performance consisting of filming and editing a promotional trailer for the performance itself. The audience observes the rapid-fire setup and recording of eighty microscenes, which are simultaneously edited and arranged live by an editor into a short trailer video. The piece was inspired by the ways in which we curate and perform idealized versions of ourselves online through social media platforms and beyond. By privileging the development of web presence over the performance itself, The Glory Machine archly proposes an all-in investment into "cultural capital, responding to (by playing along with) the labor obligatorily required to generate online presence and social media outreach. Conceived as a virus, The Glory Machine follows social media logic, producing its own promotional material to reproduce itself indefinitely.
"It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books, setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them."
- Jorge Luis Borges, introduction to The Garden of Forking Paths
In the press:
"The attention economy is eroding and taking over politics, the media and other departments of the public domain from within. The Glory Machine offers no real resistance or a solution. It very lovingly puts its finger on the sore spot. Well worth it." Theaterkrant Critic's Pick, read the review HERE
Best new text/choreography/libretto of 2022 - Fransien van der Putt - Theaterkrant
Since 2021, Billy Mullaney is an associated artist at TILT. He performs in How to Exit a Reality (Attempt 1 of 19) and TILT produces his new work The Glory Machine, in co-production with the Veem House for Performance and Productiehuis Theater Rotterdam.