Game of Life is a groundbreaking project from the internationally acclaimed Toronto-based collective, bluemouth inc. This ambitious work comprises two interconnected pieces, elephant and Lucy AI, both of which delve into the essence of human experience. elephant is an immersive, participatory performance that probes the forces that bind us together, while Lucy AI is a cutting-edge interactive audio-visual installation. Powered by artificial intelligence, Lucy AI contemplates memory and the importance of learning to release the past.
For twenty five years bluemouth inc. has been devising immersive experiences. That’s a long time to share a collective practice. Our shared sense of time—how we map it, name it, and mark it with rituals of ending and beginning—leads to our ambitious new diptych project: Game of Life. Game of Life’s urgency comes from Lucy’s story. Lucy Simic is one of bluemouth’s founders and a core member of the company. Just before the COVID-19 pandemic, at the age of 49, Lucy was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, a rare and terminal form called ROS1. What do we do now?, we wondered. How can our collective work hold the particular mortality of one of us? What will bring us together when things fall apart? These questions compelled us to develop Game of Life’s two component works, elephant and Lucy AI. In elephant a vast, square 40-seat table becomes the stage for a bluemouth dinner party. Six performers recreate our first meeting as a group after Lucy shared her diagnosis – a dinner party long-delayed by Covid and rocked by the political charge of George Floyd’s murder.
Drawing inspiration from Judy Chicago’s groundbreaking 1979 installation The Dinner Party, elephant casts its audience as honorary company members at a multimedia banquet. They become participants in party games we invented and in our discussions about the value of community and the challenges of learning to let go. With music, dance, projections, it’s part documentary, part lucid dream—and not entirely under control. As performer-creator Tony Chong says: "We are not the landlords of the time we have here–we are merely the tenants. The Elephant decides when it wants to occupy our space and it is not the one moving out.”
elephant’s sister piece is an installation about the future of memory and the way that emerging technologies are reshaping our conceptions of the border between life and death. In a dim, crystalline exhibition-space with five-channel projection, audiences encounter a performer unlike any they’ve ever met: Lucy AI. We’ve partnered with Montreal-based ReImagine AI to create a large-language model built from Lucy Simic’s performance archive, personal stories, images, syntax and voice–a dizzying simulation of Lucy’s self-presentation that asks how and when an artist’s practice might outlive its creator.
Like elephant, Lucy AI will propose a series of questions and stories to her visitors that probe assumptions about where memory resides, and of what it’s made. A generative archive built from Lucy’s work and life, the piece asks whether an artistic practice can outlive its human source. Lucy AI bends AI-assisted human cognition back into the field of art, where we have no answers, only better questions.
bluemouth inc. is a critically acclaimed and award-winning Canadian performance collective that has created original and immersive performances since 1998. Our members’ practices span disciplines, but we are brought together by the vision of a collective language that bears witness to our times and honours personal experience. bluemouth’s current resident creators and production team are Lisa Humber, Mariel Marshall, Stephen O’Connell and Lucy Simic.
Stephen and Lucy are also founding members of bluemouth. This core team created bluemouth’s breakout work DANCE MARATHON (2010), which saw presentations at Harbourfront Centre’s World Stage, Vancouver Winter Olympics, Dance Massive in Melbourne, 10 Days on the Island (Tasmania), Fabrik Potsdam, Cork Midsummer Festival, Barbican Centre (London), and the Traverse Theatre (Edinburgh). Dance Marathon was followed by It Comes in Waves (2015) which played to sold out audiences at the Pan American Games in Toronto before touring in an adapted form to The Traverse Theatre (Edinburgh). Following this, Café Sarajevo (2019) had its world premiere at the M1 Singapore Fringe and the North American premiere at the Progress Festival in Toronto before the Covid-19 pandemic halted touring.
The pandemic and its ever changing influence brought new key artists into bluemouth inc.–a team that developed Game of Life: dance artists Tony Chong and Carol Prieur (both of the internationally lauded Compagnie Marie Chouinard), writer-performer Erum Khan (Buddies in Bad Times Associate, Noor writer and one of the original collaborators on Concord Floral) and co-creator and sound designer Michael Wanless*.* Other acclaimed members of Game of Life team include: video and projection designer Jeremy Mimnagh, set and light designer Echo Zhou, and composer Deanna Choi . ReImagine AI founder, Technologist and Gemini Award-winning musician David Usher leads implementation for Lucy AI.
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