Theatre of Ocean: Stories of Performance Between Us

Written by Alexa Wilson

THEATRE OF OCEAN is a memoir of outtakes from international performance and video artist, New Zealand choreographer Alexa Wilson. She guides the reader through fragmented musings that traverse the spaces between cultures and identities at a digitally, politically and environmentally escalating time in the early 21st Century.

The writing in Theatre of Ocean ranges from hyper-emotional prose-poem to film script to academic feminist critique to humour piece. Written largely in Berlin, the book expresses a feminism through a theatre of words; juxtaposing real stories with art works and musings performed, scripted, staged, or improvised, Theatre of Ocean reveals an artist clawing at the possibilities for socio-political change in the fabric of our world, in a dynamic triumvirate of settings: New York, Berlin, New Zealand.

Theatre of Ocean uses its central metaphor to connect everyone and everything through a relentless ocean of performances within frameworks of experience, often violent, offering the reader opportunities for engagement. Ultimately, it is the opposite of an autobiography about an individual – it is stories of performance between an individual and her audience as well as those in her world, the collective forces that both affect and are affected by an individual, and what an individual can do to transform these forces.