SUPPORT THIS PROJECT: Phantom Limb’s “69˚S.” – The Final Stage

Phantom Limb has been at work on 69˚S. (formerly known as The Shackleton Project) for over three years now and the world premiere is just around the corner.

This piece has taken Erik and Jessica to Antarctica, Australia and beyond and for the final developmental stage, the entire company travels to Groningen, Netherlands where their unparalleled vision for the stage premieres in August at Holland’s Noorderzon Festival. The Grand Theatre in Groningen has been working away for the past 6 months making a 21’ hydraulic puppet shipwreck that collapses in three phases, a flaming life-size skeleton puppet and our entire wardrobe for the show.

In Groningen, PLC will have the opportunity to be in residence for FIVE weeks with the cast, sets, puppets, lights, video, and costumes, making the final montage of our show in the very theatre that we will premiere the piece. This rare collaboration is worth its weight in gold. Now we must earn the gold.

Following Noorderzon, 69˚S will have its US premiere at the Hopkins Center for the Arts, Dartmouth College and a highly anticipated New York premiere as part of the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater.

In Phantom Limb’s 69˚S., a vestige from Antarctica’s past is reignited by a contemporary crisis, uniting and juxtaposing the harrowing and heroic tale of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 trans-Antarctic expedition with the realities of a changing environment and the planet’s uncertain future.

69˚S. is the nautical location where Shackleton’s ship the Endurance sank, the precise coordinates of the crisis, PLC is interested in looking at what the modern 69˚S. is today and how we approach it, looking at how to recalibrate our ambitions and goals to have a holistic impact on our community and environment.

Phantom Limb (Jessica Grindstaff & Erik Sanko, Co-Artistic Directors) is joined by an extraordinary team of multi-disciplinary collaborators, including contemporary music icons Kronos Quartet, fashion experimentalists threeASFOUR, video artists Automatic Release, and live performances by Skeleton Key. Synthesizing theater, dance, puppetry, photography, film, original contemporary music and an unconventional acoustic palette creating a stunning and evocative series of tableaux vivants that follows a group of gentlemen frozen (literally) in crisis.

69˚S. is an artistic and emotional journey that explores the symbiotic relationship between humans and the environment and reinvigorates the spirit of foregoing individual glory for the sake of collective survival.

Your TAX-DEDUCTIBLE support not only guarantees the realization of a dynamic new work for the theater but will see the project through to its realization in cities across the US and internationally in the years to follow, bringing the company’s firsthand knowledge of the messages the Antarctic landscape has to tell us via new work for the stage and an exceptional series of educational programs for all ages. In a time of massive cuts to theater budgets and shortage of funding for new artists, this can only happen with your help.

69˚S. is an ArKtype Project produced in association with Beth Morrison Projects.