Friendly Fire (A Coronation)

Creator, Writer & Co-Rona: Dorit Cypis

Director: Chris Tyler

Dramaturge: Johanna Cypis

Video Editor: Peter Wu

Coliseum #2: Rook Campbell

Prop Construction: Matt Warren

Everything has shifted under and around us. It’s a new world order with broken old world structures. We need to relocate our bodies spatially, temporally and socially. How do we assess conditions with new eyes, ears, minds and bodies to weave our ways toward developing generative models for who we want to be to ourselves and to one another?

Friendly Fire is a performance, video and Zoom event exploring how histories are embodied and refracted by us, often unconsciously. Even as we hold elevated principals and values, we often get blind-sighted to how we actually treat each other.

In Act 1, we meet Co-Rona, our protagonist, as she lands disoriented in the new pandemic world, struggling to locate herself. She blindly carries a collar around her shoulders: Half of a Roman coliseum – an architecture of the past representing power, competition and spectatorship. As we join her on her journey through space and time, we examine through facilitated reflection how the conflicts of the world between us can simultaneously live within us.

Background: Friendly Fire is phase 3 of One Another, an exploration and questioning of Identiy Politics asking: how can we acknowledge our human differences while working together towards social change?

One Another incorporated research, dialogue and performance to challenge diversity categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, etc. that question systemic oppression while continuing to divide and exclude through these same categories.

The Covid19 pandemic of 2020 abruptly changed our in-person social engagement into social distancing and isolation. One Another shifted its focus to consider how to reflect and transform our internal somatic landscapes of internalized social traumas that inevitably trap us into bias and reactive behavior.