MONKEY

BUSINESS

CLASS

Monkey Business Class intertwines the musical theater genre with the medieval morality play Everyman. Thematically, the performance is a contemplation of the fate of currency at the end of the twentieth century: it is a final farewell to paper money as it yields to plastic credit cards, electronic transactions, and biometrically controlled financial accounts—all of which predate contemporary cryptocurrencies.

The performance space is stratified into three horizontal fields: the surface of the stage; a video screen that hovers above the stage, displaying live and prerecorded video; and the fly loft, located behind and high above the proscenium. As performers move vertically through these registers, their material presence changes before the audience. When a live performer is hoisted into the middle register, he or she becomes a video presence—either a live on-camera image or a prerecorded likeness that can defy the laws of physics. If the performer is hoisted even higher, into the deep space of the fly loft, his or her appearance is reflected back to the audience via a mirror tipped up forty-five degrees from the stage, as if viewed through a periscope. There, the performer can break loose, immersed in the world of theatrical illusion, while audience members watch from the comfort of their stationary seats.

The central characters are an American cowboy, a Danish sailor, and a Japanese geisha—three figures that personify the cultural clichés attributed to the home countries of the Monkey Business Class creative team. Each of the characters is accompanied by a video doppelgänger.

Monkey Business Class was a collaboration with Hotel Pro Forma (Copenhagen, Denmark) and Dumb Type (Kyoto, Japan), commissioned for Copenhagen Cultural Capital ’96.