Image by Scott Shaw
Jack Ferver’s solo examines the permeability between the real and the fictive, utilizing performative constructs to deconstruct where, how, and why we make personas for ourselves. While Ferver began working on the solo in 2012 for FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival, this stylized lecture-performance has been built to grow, adapt, and change alongside Ferver’s concerns and larger creations, creating a humorous and disarming retrospective of his life and work. Through sudden shifts in style and form, blurred boundaries emerge between the realms of grand theatrics and stark naturalism, the persona and the self.
From Fusebox In this funny and moving lecture-performance, Jack Ferver tells us about himself. Or, rather he delivers a performance that blurs the boundaries between the self and persona, interrogating questions of memory, trauma, psychology, and the relationship between a performer and his spectators. Virtuosic dance overlaps with multivalent monologue; when he stops speaking, his body carries on the conversation. The mirror, a hallmark of Ferver’s work, reflects the delicate dance of performing and being, never stopping long enough for us to guess which it is. As we watch, we see ourselves—our multiples selves—reflected too.