Scarecrow
Company:
The Tank
An experimental dance theater deathbed hallucination where mind and body stand in open confrontation, Scarecrow is a quiet, disorienting psychodrama set in a temporally ambiguous suburban interior that is also a wheatfield: where memories deteriorate, the unseen insists on being felt, and the body returns to its limits.
Actors assemble in portrait tableaux and cry on cue. Blending dance with unsettling imagery, Scarecrow unfolds through fragments of plot and vignettes that loop as in a fever dream. The work oscillates between clinical cognitive structures and dissociative psychic mechanisms with scenic design by Josh Oberlander and lighting design by Cheyenne Sykes.
Stylistically influenced by Peter Greenaway’s Drowning by Numbers, E. Elias Merhige’s Begotten, and Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow, the work superimposes two simultaneous yet separate narrative compositions — one of text and one of the body — whose disjunction leaves an interstice that becomes a locus for truth neither register can articulate by itself.
