Associate artist TILT: Billy Mullaney - The Glory Machine- Veem House for Performance - AMSTERDAM

We are very excited to announce the premiere of The Glory Machine by Billy Mullaney, associated artist at TILT, at Veem House for Performance on 1 April 2022.

Critic's Pick: Super-efficient trailer recording points to the dangers of attention economy in Theaterkrant by Fransien von der Putt (dutch) - read the review HERE

The Glory Machine is a theatre performance consisting of filming and editing a promotional trailer for the performance itself. The audience observes the rapid-fire setup and recording of eighty microscenes, which are simultaneously edited and arranged live by an editor into a short trailer video. The piece was inspired by the ways in which we curate and perform idealized versions of ourselves online through social media platforms and beyond. By privileging the development of web presence over the performance itself, The Glory Machine archly proposes an all-in investment into "cultural capital, responding to (by playing along with) the labor obligatorily required to generate online presence and social media outreach. Conceived as a virus, The Glory Machine follows social media logic, producing its own promotional material to reproduce itself indefinitely.

"It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books, setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them."

- Jorge Luis Borges, introduction to The Garden of Forking Paths

Since 2021, Billy Mullaney is an associated artist at TILT. He performs in How to Exit a Reality (Attempt 1 of 19) and TILT produces his new work The Glory Machine, in co-production with the Veem House for Performance and Productiehuis Theater Rotterdam.

Billy Mullaney (USA/NL) is an Amsterdam-based artist working in theatre, choreography, and performance art. His research focuses on representational practices in and of various sites of performance, the modes of spectatorship they conventionally engender, and how interventions in the former affect the latter. By rigorously embodying such interventions, Billy's work often foregrounds the physiological impact of movement and thought on the body, indexing the stakes of adhering too closely (or too successfully) to logics such as the attention economy or post-fordist production. This research has led him to experiment with forms ranging from quantum physics lectures and children's television shows to promotional trailers and tarot card readings. www.billymullaney.com

Credits:

Created by Billy Mullaney performed by Esmée Begemann, Elliot Dehaspe, Jimmy Grima, Maja Grzeczka, Billy Mullaney, Ylva Rietman and Tom de Ronde light and technique Mathisse Coornaert artistic advice Andrea Božić and Konstantina Georgelou production Marco Heijne management TILT Marieke van Bueren special thanks to Ruth Borg and Laura Boser photography Thomas Lenden

Produced by TILT
Co-produced by Veem House for Performance and Productiehuis Theater Rotterdam

Made possible by the financial contribution of NORMA fonds, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and Janivo Stichting
Research made possible by DAS Theatre and Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds/Horizon