At REDCAT, all the world's a stage. Geoffrey Farmer: Let's Make the Water Turn Black officially opens on Saturday night in the art gallery that occupies most of the lobby, but the artist has been in residence there since mid-February, literally laying the groundwork for a performative sculptural installation that will continue to expand and enliven the theater's public spaces through early April. Farmer's is a perfect sensibility for the venue, as his work typically blurs boundaries between art and experimental theater, involving a hybrid cast of live performers and kinetic sculptural elements not entirely unlike the sort of thing you might find on the stage inside. And, in Farmer's view, also not entirely unlike the showmanship and voyeurism of our modern-day society of the spectacle. Farmer employs his usual approach of creating site-responsive mixed-media installations that host an evolving series of microperformances throughout the show's run. As is also intrinsic to Farmer's work, these performances (which the artist calls “sculpture plays”) constitute an interpretive response to a given site's historical cultural context — in this case, a look at several generations of L.A.'s pioneering counterculture.

Tuesdays-Sundays. Starts: Feb. 18. Continues through April 10, 2011

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