Julie Hammond
Hindsight 2020
The daily words of 20+ artists during the pandemic brought to life
It’s been five years since the world turned upside-down.
This project began in late 2019 as a year-long collaborative writing experiment. At the time, before the year turned, Julie assembled a collection of 20 people from four different countries to keep diaries of their thoughts, feelings, and actions over the course of 2020. Incredibly, as the year progressed through pandemic, lockdowns, protests, and a fraught election, the chroniclers kept with the project, generating hundreds of pages of material for Hindsight 2020.
Now, Julie and a full team of technicians and designers are putting these diaries into the mouths of seven actors for an ultra-marathon 9-hour-long reading of the full text, one time only, on Sunday, June 22nd, at the Risk/Reward Festival.
The ensemble knows how the piece starts and how it ends, but the in-betweens are open to what emerges from the actors and designers. The space will evolve over the course of the day. The actors will get tired. People will come and go. The team has been spending a lot of time thinking about strategies for survival – how everyone, both performers and audience, can make it through nine hours of performance. Julie believes that the answer might live within a contract of trust: the performers are looking out for the audience, and the audience is giving them someone to talk to.
At the moment, there are no future plans for the piece—unless someone comes knocking. Hammond jokes about doing it again in 2040. “So… maybe check back in 15 years.”
More about the artists:
Julie Hammond (Project Director) is a mother, theatre maker, dramaturg for multidisciplinary performance, and instigator of public projects currently based in Portland, Oregon. Her work as a theatre director has toured and been presented by On the Boards (Seattle), Artists Repertory Theatre (Portland), Z Below (San Francisco), the Alliance of Jewish Theatres (Boston, MA), and the rEvolver Festival (Vancouver, BC), among others. From 2015-2019 she co-created 14 shows with Hand2Mouth Theatre. Recent participatory public art projects include an ongoing re-signing and community history of Portland’s Peninsula Park, a year-long residency through the Vancouver Park Board, a community performance/installation for Richmond Public Art, soundwalks for Vancouver New Music, Third Angle New Music, and New Works Calgary, and collaborations with students in elementary and secondary schools exploring historical landmarks, site, and boredom. juliehammond.net
Peter Ksander (Scenographer) is a scenographer and media artist whose work has been presented both nationally and internationally. He was a founding curator of the Incubator Arts Project in NYC, won an Obie Award for the scenic design of Untitled Mars (this title may change), and a Bessie Award for the visual design of This Was the End. Recent Portland credits include designs for The Americans, Apoptosis, The Cherry Orchard, Fronteriza, The Weather Room, Sweat, Indecent. He holds an M.F.A. from CalArts, is a professor at Reed College, and is a member of the Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble (PETE).
Jen Mitas (Dramaturg) got her start in queer solo performance in New York in the late 1990s. She has spent the last twenty-five years helping artists and organizations hone and realize their visions. As a facilitator for The Field in New York she led workshops using the feedback technique (Fieldwork), including week-long artist residencies. As a lecturer and researcher in the UK, she led courses in performance devising, theory and history with BA and MA students at Queen Mary University of London and University of Falmouth. Upon her return to the US she was Hand2Mouth Theatre’s Executive Director for 7 years, producing projects, tours, stewarding conversation events, and developing/ managing a community arts space (Shout House). Recent projects include dramaturgy for Katherine Longstreth and co-creating Slumber Party.
You can catch this piece on Sunday, June 22nd, between 10am and 7pm. Tickets are not required, and the audience is free to come and go as they please at any time through-out the runtime. There will be snacks.
