About the work

Elasticene is a 55-minute hybrid performance work at the intersection of experimental music, sound installation, movement & speculative fiction, by performance duo Throat Pleats. Twenty-first-century humans have a “habit of parsing the world into dull matter (it, things) and vibrant life (us, beings)” (Jane Bennett 2010). As binaries between living and non-living materials and human and non-human lives are blurred, Throat Pleats, in their first long form work, embark on a material exploration of latex, plastic and rubber as lively agents in imagined lives. The man-made materials of the Anthropocene have fled their makers to form new weird ecologies; Elasticene embraces and finds whimsy in strange, imagined futures where materials and beings biologically entangle.

 Throat Pleats dismantles the boundaries between instrument and performer, using plastic reeds, balloons, tubes, and wind instruments as sculptural & sonic objects. Amidst environmental collapse, the work positions synthetic materials as both collaborators and antagonists in a choreographed negotiation of breath, resistance, and play. The balloon—a delicate expanding petrochemical membrane containing human breath—becomes a metaphor for the body’s entanglement with industrial ecologies and a collective rising anxiety about impending climate disaster. Throat Pleats musically repurposes detritus of the Anthropocene to find joy, strangeness and beauty amidst a world choked by our material creations, presenting a posthuman, anti-virtuosic reimagining of contemporary musical performance in the twenty-first century.

Elasticene was developed with the support of Brand X and Vitalstatistix’ Adhocracy Program.

The work premiered as part of Brand X’s Flying Nun program in February 2024