The Builders Association is recognized for our "Zeitgeist" sensibility, dealing with contemporary issues which our productions have foreshadowed, such as outsourcing in ALLADEEN (2003), surveillance of personal data in SUPER VISION (2005), and social networking in CONTINUOUS CITY (2007). Our new production will embrace the crisis of the idea of ownership, and the massive sense of change from home to homelessness from New York to Iceland to Dubai. Our work on this production will initially explore the current mortgage and foreclosure crisis, and the related social and political impacts, particularly the resurgence of middle-class migrants in America.
Our company was formed 15 years ago in an industrial space in New York City, where we created a large-scale production of Ibsen's play The Master Builder, staged in a deconstructed three-story house. 15 years later, we have been investigating the idea of recycling the materials, concepts, and technologies of the past in our radically changed global landscape, and the current crisis suggests to us that the house will remain a memory, foreclosed. Its former inhabitants must perform elsewhere.
ROAD TRIP will weave a contemporary narrative of the peripatetic evicted, contrasting the Dustbowl Era's migration West with a modern journey East: a family foreclosed out of their California housing development that takes to the road in their luxury SUV, learning to live from the car, finding community, and bearing witness to the many stranger-than-fiction tales of the resurgence of nomadic life in 21st Century America. As with all of the company's work, this piece will draw from 'real life' events as source material: for instance, a group of squatters in the Midwest who, against all odds, are welcomed into an almost empty housing development; a set of incomplete tract homes populated only by bobcats; foreclosure bus tours, and, of course, the growing tent communities springing up adjacent to free or unprotected services.
The production will move between the canvas tent, lantern-lit world of the 1930's and the complex and contemporary digital environments for which the Builders are best known. And each night, our family must stop traveling, create a world for the night, and, using the tools available to them, affirm their place in that world. The conclusion of the production will present a vision of the future, of different homes and possible senses of community.