Insite

Moe Angelos (left) and Jess Barbagallo (right) in JET LAG.

JET LAG tells the story of relationships drastically altered by travel and digital communications. Jess Barbagallo is a Brooklyn-based playwright and performer who collaborated with The Builders Association on JET LAG. She and I met while writing in the backyard of Champion Coffee, a neighborhood coffee shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, several months ago. After seeing Jess perform the parts of Nantucket and Lincoln Schwartz in JET LAG, at Peak Performances on October 1, I decided to chat online with Jess about her experiences performing with The Builders Association and her life as a performer in New York.  Read more »

Insite’s Student Forum begins the 2010-11 season with a round of student responses to recent performances of JET LAG.  Liz Lehman starts us off with her critique below.  Visit Student Forum to read more by Amanda Bell, Thomas J. Foy, and Lisa Zalenski—all offering different perspectives on The Builders Association’s multilayered integration of technology and live performance.  These critiques were written for Dr. Neil Baldwin’s class Introduction to the Theatrical Medium and fulfill the mission of Montclair State’s Creative Research Center, directed by Dr. Baldwin, to spotlight exemplary student writing. 

Going into JET LAG, it is easy to get caught up in the technology that makes the piece so unique in its storytelling. Jets take off on a screen in front of you, and you can feel the rumbling beneath your feet. You can explore the open sea with an amateur sailor without ever leaving the theater. The visual and auditory effects are so immersive that it is easy to get overwhelmed. 

However, JET LAG is not about wowing the audience with its groundbreaking technology. It is a study in the technology that is available to all of us, every day, and the dangerous consequences of that technology being used to escape conventional reality. Read more »

When talking about a piece as complex and multileveled as JET LAG, it’s only fair to break the piece down into two parts: firstly, the story of Roger Dearborn, then the tale of Doris Geller and Lincoln Schwartz.  Each part is unique in its own way but shares a similar message.  JET LAG presents this message in a unique way that seems unfocused.  The use of multimedia was daring and maverick but sometimes too much. Read more »

JET LAG is a project aimed at collaborating live performers with technology.  It is a harmony between actor and machine to convey two stories of people disconnected from time and space.  The Builders Association and Diller Scofidio + Renfro used JET LAG to convey a message of how technology can make or break humanity and sanity.  The stimuli in JET LAG’s performances captivated the audience into an unexpected and unknown world.  The technological stimuli made the audience sense what it is to be lost in time and space. Read more »

The Builders Association and Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s creation, JET LAG, is a show that is technologically brilliant but lacks deeper development behind the stories of its main characters. The show combines actors, lighting, sounds, cameras, videos, mirrors, and minimal set pieces to create a cross-media performance with the intention to leave the audience in awe. The two stories follow three characters who drastically manipulate time, which unfortunately ends in fatalities. I had never seen a show where the technology was of equal or more importance than the actual performers, and it was very interesting to watch. Although most of the time the show was intriguing, there were some times where I was left in the dark, unsure of what had just happened. Read more »