Lingua Franca
Lingua Franca explores the manipulation of essential elements everyday life–language, music, food, water, light and darkness–in the context of the recent debate in America concerning the use of torture. The show highlights comic and tender moments of mundane life – kids watching TV, dogs peeing on fire hydrants, a mother bathing her young child – and contrasts these with quiet but compelling scenes in which the interrogation of an invisible suspect takes place by a pair of disembodied hands. Lingua Franca draws complex threads of connection between the beauty of our everyday human experience, and the parallel secret and perilous world of those who we assign to protect it. Musician Ralph Denzer performs a lush soundscape of original music that accompanies the multi-layered collage of classic toy theater puppetry and untraditional outside-the-box scenes performed by the puppeteer.