Celebration,
Florida
I made Celebration, Florida while spending a lot of time alone in airports, hotel rooms and unfamiliar cities. It’s a piece shaped by distance, loneliness, desire and the unexpected freedom that can come from rootlessness.
Each performance features two guest performers who have never met and haven’t seen the show. They wear headphones and receive recorded instructions from me. Together, they try to follow what they hear as they recreate gestures, narrate images and build the show moment by moment in front of the audience. Through them, I try to reconstruct something—a mood, a place, a memory.
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Celebration, Florida is a a quietly surreal performance for anyone who has ever missed anyone or anything.
Veering between reality and simulation, it orbits ideas of surrogacy: a stand-in for a person you miss, a looped memory you can’t stop thinking about, a version of intimacy that’s a little bit off, but close enough to feel real.
“Greg Wohead’s latest is a gradual play of imitations, recreations and simulacra. Set, both physically and conceptually, on the fringes of a Walt Disney designed Florida town, a hodge-podge of architectural styles thrown together into a madman’s image of the perfect small town America experience. Like White Rabbit Red Rabbit or Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree, it’s performed by two perfect strangers, this time taking commands via headphones, and presenting a moving tone poem on loss and retrieval, on longing, memory and emotional projection. It burns slow and sure, leaving both sadness and hope hanging fog-like in the room.”
Full programme note from the original performance run:
Celebration, Florida is a planned community in Osceola County, Florida. It’s near Disney World and was originally developed by the Walt Disney Company. It features a town square, houses modelled on a variety of architectural styles (Victorian, Gothic, American plantation house) and a fully integrated graphic design of everything from street signs and shop signs to manhole covers, golf course graphics and fountains. To some, Celebration is a dream come true; quaint nostalgic Americana brought to life. But to others it all seems inauthentic.
Because of the temperate Florida climate, autumn foliage can be rare, so every October leaf-shaped confetti is pumped into the Celebration, Florida town square. I’m obsessed with The Falling of the Leaves. It’s this genuinely exciting moment even though you can see all the fakeness. The device pumping out paper leaves, everyone gathered to catch them. To me it feels fun and funny and strange and maybe a little bit sad.
Celebration, Florida (the performance), for me feels like this moment, only with people instead of paper leaves. Where the paper leaves are standing in for real leaves, in the performance two people who are unrehearsed and have never met are also both stand ins. Even though the unrehearsed performers are standing in for someone else, they are also their own people–they are self-consciously themselves and someone else at the same time, constantly slipping off one and onto the other.
The performers hear my voice in their ear guiding them on what to do and say. They know almost nothing about the show beforehand. There’s a sense of playback delays, disconnection, missed details, a voice that’s *just* out of hearing range, a sense of the odd, the off-centre, the peculiar. Maybe there’s an invitation to imagine and to try and access what has gone on in another place. My hope is that the form of the piece can help create a portal to this slightly strange other place. In that way, Celebration, Florida isn’t really about Celebration, Florida. It is sort of about an anyplace, whatever way you’d like to interpret that.
I made the performance with an energy of reaching out for connection with other people. That reach itself requires vulnerability, and it can feel thrilling, confusing, comforting, maddening and impossible. Sort of like the Falling of the Leaves x 100.
Concept and performance Greg Wohead
Photography Jonathan Potter
Celebration, Florida was commissioned by the Albany a developed at The Yard. Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.