Sight Lines is an intergenerational, multimodal performance that explores how we talk about, work together, and imagine our futures in the context of climate disaster.
Calla Hanratty tests the audio during Sight Lines (Shira Leuchter).
Sight Lines is a performance in many parts: an archive of the sky, an audio narrative that documents three years of conversations between my daughter Calla and me, and an invitation to make a collaborative record of the moment with other audience-participants. Sight Lines proposes that we might never be able to have the perfect conversation, or make the perfect thing, but at least we can try; it is a performance that is interested in embracing failure as a way of starting to build better worlds before we really know how to do it and what these futures might look like.
Calla Hanratty explains a photo she drew while on a research trip to the garbage dump.
Sight Lines thinks about time both in terms of generational history and futures, and in terms of quickly approaching deadlines to meet environmental goals. It centers the often invisible work of parenting, and asks how we raise children in light of the impending disaster we’ve made. How do we look at the world, together? How can we share questions with our children and work on the answers together? Sight Lines asks participants to listen and make something collaboratively, using the skills we’ll need to solve our biggest problems.
Audiences peruse the archival material during Sight Lines, July 2022 (Chris Hanratty).