THE SEED EATERS
AS SEEN BY RACHEL KAuDER NALEBUFF

I remember films, plays and even my own life best in sensory fragments: the moment in Ida when the judge jumps out the window and the music stops, an actor's spittle falling onto me during Shakespeare in the park when I was a kid, my sister's hand reaching for the volume dial on a drive through Chicago.

Can performance capture this way of thinking? Or exist like a memory, where senses combine vividly without logic but make total intuitive sense?
/1 Of course a slow dance scene should be performed while wearing shoes that are too large. And of course the shoes should be placed on the coloured squares to end the scene.
The Seed Eaters, a performance about endings and order by Emily Mast, myself and many others commissioned for the 2017 season at the Grazer Kunstverein, is a living collection of such fragmentary moments. That is to say it is a deconstructed play where language, image, sound and people's personalities all have equal value — so as you watch it, it already feels like a play that has ended, like something you are remembering. The performance is comprised of seventeen vignettes, each one located at a different station in the gallery with a sculptural set and props that any three people can activate by reading the accompanying scripts. 
/2
Coinciding with the first five nights of the 2017 Steirischer Herbst festival, the Grazer Kunstverein invited three new community members a night to activate stations. When performed as a whole, the vignettes form a compilation of endings about the evening, sex, the climate, a night out, the lifecycle of swimsuits, illness, the objects we accumulate over a lifetime, the last bite of cake and so many more that, when performed in order, we begin to see endings as expansive — equal parts melancholy and joyful and mundane. 
To begin: the performance starts with credits. 

Everyone — friends who gave us feedback during early workshops in my kitchen, all the performers in Graz, and the person who dyed socks for costumes — are all listed here alphabetically and this is the first thing anyone sees before entering the performance space.

The Seed Eaters is designed to always be performed twice: one way in English and the way back in whatever the local or most common second language may be. In Austria, we did it in English and un Deutsch.​​
/3 Instructions for a scene about the end of an illness. The flip side of this tablet is in German.
/4 Anna, Alex, and Margot bow during the matinee performance. The bows happen at the beginning of the show. 
To help with gallery acoustics and to equalise everyone’s outfit, the audience is invited to wear socks.
/5 Emily Mast and Fiona Hallinan in socks watching the audience put on their socks.
/6 Each scene is elemental enough to become a kind of frame for people. We learn so much about people by how they choose to wear these.
My favourite aspect of the project came from the realisation we made in Graz that each group of performers ought to pick their own selection of vignettes to perform. Because we only had one rehearsal and many formal elements must be precise, there was no time or energy left over to play. For example, the costumes are unisex aprons that can be worn in a multitude of styles. Now, instead of rushing through this to find the quickest way to button a button, we can watch everyone discover their personal look and it is clear that this is part of the performance.

In order to give proper time for these explorations, the performers chose 10 of the seventeen vignettes to perform each night. This also meant that performers could then leave out or willingly take on a vignette that was an emotional or physical challenge.​
/7 This was the one group that elected to perform this scene
​/8 Multiple groups wanted to perform this scene about three women talking in the recovery room of an abortion clinic.
/9 No one in Graz wanted to do a scene where you peel very phallic vegetables
I was always surprised by what was challenging and what was easy and I loved never having to make an assumption about anyone. This also mixed up all our roles in a way that was fitting. The performers became the authors of their own show. The collaborating artists and team at the Grazer Kunstverein became like audience members because each night was so different and we could watch each performance with surprise. Audience members became like performers because they were enticed to activate any remaining stations they didn't see after the show.
/10 Audience members exploring a station after a performance. Kate Strain, who directs the Grazer Kunstverein and Emily and I agree it would be good to come to the exhibit and activate these stations on a date.
The last night of the performance at the Grazer Kunstverein, the piece featured two students at the Graz University, Hannah and Marwin, and a musician, Anja. After the show, an audience member told me that she’d loved the moment when Anja was so in character from playing the orgasm that she confidently walked to the wrong station. She told me she completely related to the feeling. I loved hearing this because it meant that this woman had been watching Anja as Anja and not as an actor or an entertainer. She had seen Anja as a musician from Germany who lives in an apartment and teaches music and wears very pressed denim and had rehearsed with us only for a couple of hours and gotten swept up in the moment like any other human being. Austrian audiences, I was told, are trained to look for perfection. I think this is true in New York. I know I feel this impulse in myself. There is more I want to explore with The Seed Eaters, but my hope is that it creates such a considered frame that imperfection and vulnerability can be seen for what they are—not the stuff of amateurs, but as what connects us and is true. ​
/11 Eva, Sinica and Christoph.
/1: Rehearsal still of The Seed Eaters, Grazer Kunstverein, 2017. Photo: Lena Dragoljic.
/2: Rehearsal still from The Seed Eaters, Grazer Kunstverein, 2017. Photo: Lena Dragoljic.
/3: Installation view of The Seed Eaters, Grazer Kunstverein, 2017. Photo: Lena Dragoljic.
/4: Performance still from The Seed Eaters, Grazer Kunstverein, 2017. Photo: Thomas Raggam
/5: Performance still from The Seed Eaters, Grazer Kunstverein, 2017. Photo: Rachel Kauder Nalebuff.
/6: Rehearsal still of The Seed Eaters, Grazer Kunstverein, 2017. Photo: Lena Dragoljic
/7: Rehearsal still of The Seed Eaters, Grazer Kunstverein, 2017. Photo: Lena Dragoljic
/8: Performance still of The Seed Eaters, Grazer Kunstverein, 2017. Photo: Thomas Raggam
/9: Exhibition still of The Seed Eaters, Grazer Kunstverein, 2017. Photo: Emily Mast
/10: Performance still of The Seed Eaters, Grazer Kunstverein, 2017. Photo: Rachel Kauder Nalebuff.
/11: Rehearsal still of The Seed Eaters, Grazer Kunstverein, 2017. Photo: Lena Dragoljic