There’s a walkthrough of geological time in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. It’s a humbling experience to walk through the whole history of the planet. My littlest daughter loved to run through the angry red extinctions. You get to the Holocene extinction and...it gets really depressing. They’ve got a monitor there where you can watch the estimated number of species that have died since the museum opened that morning. (It’s not given the kind of emphasis it needs though. They should have a bench or a coffee shop there. Think of the sponsorship opportunities. The current mass extinction: brought to you in part by Starbucks. Something like that.) Anyway...my youngest daughter loved running through the extinctions. I think she got a little restless somewhere around the Cambrian era. It’s understandable: the Cambrian explosion. All that oxygen. All that oxygen suddenly appeared in the atmosphere and suddenly the earth had this huge diversity of life.
This month, Cooperative Performance Milwaukee celebrates the Cambrian explosion in biodiversity as it presents Cambrian--a look back to that bygone era 500 million years ago when life and diversity was rapidly expanding. We may not have been there, but it’s nice to kind of look back as everything dies off to an era when it was all being born. From the official announcement:
“Cambrian, a sound and movement based performance, explores themes of life, evolution, and physical form. The performers isolate forms of their body and subsume materials in the space to alter their physicality and their environment. Set in a minimal achromatic setting; light, sound, and movement aim to capture the evolution from organic material to sentient life.”
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Sounds like a lot of fun. Liz Faraglia choreographs a show devised and directed by Brennen Steines. It is performed by Kelly Radermacher and Don Russell.
The show runs Oct. 28 - Nov. 6 at The Cooperativa Gallery and Studio on 207. E. Buffalo St. For more information, visit Cooperative Performance Milwaukee.
