On Thursday, October 24, the Qualcomm Institute’s IDEAS series opens its new season with “oh deer”, a performance by Padra Crisafulli, current MFA candidate in the UCSD Theatre & Dance Department’s Sound Design program.

‘oh deer’ is a new post-Anthropocene work for performers, analog mixers, and fixed media which imagines deer in a distant future discovering artifacts of the extinct human species that have not biodegraded. As basic interactions with these completely foreign artifacts create noise, the deer discover and manipulate these complex and violent tones, mouth noises, and tastes. This investigation results in a sonic landscape built upon no-input mixing practices, where harsh noise and entombed memories of humanity embrace before being extinguished by ambivalent hooves.

We, the human species, will not be around forever – however, the contemporary era has ensured that our posthumous presence on Earth will not be ‘lone and level sands’, but unfathomable amounts of plastics and other synthetic materials, ghosts of an age named for our impact. Crisafulli creates this piece to calibrate their own (and therefore, an audience’s) relationship to this fact, while using tactics of absurdity and noise to evade the sense of doom that so often looms over environmentalist topics. For humans, how can our relationship to the land shift when witnessing our complete absence – and for the deer, what tastes better; XLR cable or photographs of someone’s grandmother?

Bios:

Padra Crisafulli (Creator / Director / Composer) is a theatre artist whose work explores extreme states of emotion, perception, and being. They frequently work in performance and installation settings as a sound designer, director, and core creative collaborator. They have collaborated on work presented at the Prague Quadrennial, the National Museum of Serbia, the Park Avenue Armory, Edinburgh + Hollywood Fringe, La Jolla Playhouse, and online. They are a current MFA candidate in Sound Design at the UCSD Department of Theatre + Dance, and hold a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in Theatre Directing.

Raphael Mishler (Mask Designer) creates striking and tactile visual work for live performance. He has developed work for the stage with artists including Raja Feather Kelly and Taylor Mac and in the streets with organizations including Fight for 15!, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and Naming the Lost. Puppetry work includes June Rites! (Waterwell), The Amateurs (Vineyard), Collective Rage (MCC) and Tumacho (Clubbed Thumb, Henry Hewes nom., Drama Desk).