“Stranger comes to Town” elicits many competing notions. The alienation of both people and places but also the fascination of the seemingly familiar and mundane, typically overlooked. The exclusion from community, caste, and status but also the freedom to pursue paths often barred in membered and structured societies. Part of the allure of tourism is encountering places that are the same but different; an immersion into a verisimilitudinous realm that makes one reflect on the familiarity of home. Baudrillard in touring America found that one of the most disconcerting aspects was seeing so many people dining alone – dining, a more typically communal ritual at the very heart and foundation of civilization and community. It is interesting that the growth of humanity into large societies should pervert the very essence of its initiation. Pirandello too spent much of his career exploring this phenomena. Strangers are often both confined and liberated simultaneously and it is in this duality that interesting things happen. Isolation brings freedom.

The proposed installation cuts to the very heart of these dissonant aspects of our lives. It looks to subvert multiple facets of the known and ordinary to spur thought and re-examination of our individual urban existences. It looks to make space into object, familiar into foreign, confinement into freedom. It explores ideas of privacy, conformity, expression, decorum, alienation, community, ritual, and isolation through an immersive environment requiring participants to act in strange but customary ways with a simple object and the performance(s) it inspires.

New York-based artist John Chu is a painter and architect whose work demonstrates a fervent curiosity and passion for the built environment. His work focusses on urban walls and facades, exploring composition, form, light, and more literally, structure. In his architectural practice John further examines these concepts of structure, permanence and inclusion (and by definition exclusion). In the proposed installation, his work converges to create an experiential opportunity that speaks directly to this year’s theme: Stranger comes to Town.

It is proposed to create a freestanding structure, obelisk or pod-like, that sits alone in the space. It is in itself, monolithic and isolated. It is uninviting and inscrutable yet fascinating, one is drawn to it.

A barrier blocks the view of the space by the casual onlooker. The participant enters the space by passing around it to discover the object located centrally in the generic space. Music is emitting from the object and draws the participant in, an entrance is discovered and entering is enveloped in a wonderland of mirrors and lights. Upon closing the capsule-like hatch, one is fully immersed in music, light and infinite reflections of oneself.

Within this isolation, the participant is free. Free to dance, free to scream, free to think. Fall Hazard presents: Dance Party of One.