#22 – Alexandra Simpson and the Terra Incognita Collective

Alexandra Simpson is an interdisciplinary theatre artist with a background in dance, music, documentary, play writing, installation and directing. She has created and produced a number of audience-immersive and site-specific shows that focus on the role of the individual within collective society. Alexandra is interested in how artistic practice and activism converge and how degrowth environmentalism can be applied to consumer cultures. She is on the board for Common Boots Theatre (formerly Theatre Columbus and a member of their Devised Theatre Lab.

Terra Incognita = unknown or unexplored territory. We live in a world in which economic and personal growth is a prerequisite to being human. The alternative lies in what has yet to be explored. Confined by what we are told and know as the good life, we must choose, will we degrow on our own initiative or will we continue until the biosphere forces us to stop? This is a site specific performance documentary work that involves collective creation and theatre mask technique to explore our complicity within growth culture and the potential degrowth alternative. The work uses interviews from researchers at Research & Degrowth collected from prior research, the collective’s own experiences creating the piece, improvisation, documentation of pop-up performances around the city of Toronto (we have a performance coming up this Sunday at the Indie Exchange) and community partnerships with Greenpeace and Toronto350.org.

www.terraincogco.org
Twitter: @terra_incogco
Facebook: facebook.com/degrowthcollective

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