Joan of Arc in a supermarket in california

written by Chloe Xtina

Directed by Kaycie Sweeney
Choreo: Amelia Evans
Scenic and Costume: Cat Pfingst
Lighting: Pema Baldwin
Music: Caroline Strickland and Mikeala Jane
Sound: Ryan Gamblin
Associate Sound: Lola Basiliere

Produced by Anna Mader, Naomi Schiller, and Ellie Zambarano

“Frances odysseys down California's freeways in search of a supermarket where she once received a prophecy. As the supermarket waits for her, its teen girl employees are surveilled. Frances inches closer, California burns, and the supermarket transforms monstrously. Joan of Arc in a Supermarket in California is an epic daydream that explores intuition, paranoia, and possession”

Set in a grocery store, and staged at E&S Wholesome Foods, a bodega in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Joan of Arc in a Supermarket in California interrogates the relationship between space, surveillance, and ourselves. To actualize this in design, we used exciters (speakers that turn any surface into a resonator) attached to the air vents and shelves of the grocery store, resonating the architecture with content that surrounds you, as if the space itself were watching your every move. We then processed Strickland & Jane’s music into unnerving soundscapes, cutting up, stretching, and re-mixing their vocals and guitars into echoes that shake through the cracks in the world around the characters.