Boxman (2009)

“The first box I ever built was a mess. But you did it? Sure, I did it.”

Performance.
Duration: 1hrs
Performed, Dixon Place, Manhattan Theater Project, SITI studio, Bushwick Center For The Arts, numerous bars, shopfronts and other settings.
Artists, Kathryn Hamilton,  Matt Wilson, Terence Mintern, Devin Burnam, Zoe Kira May, Kersti Bryan, Chris Domig, Damon Pelletier, Bruce Steinberg.

Boxman is sister sylvester's first work, and draws on the novel by Kobo Abe about people who retreat from their lives to live inside human sized boxes. An amplified fairy tale set in a land of famine, wolves, and a mysterious boxman (medieval monk, obsessive shut-in, voyeur?) BOX MAN combines found and original text; meticulously choreographed work inside of chaotic physical mayhem, musical numbers with absurdist humor. It is an investigation into Abe’s claim, ‘In seeing there is love, in being seen, abhorrence.’ Together with Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Smiles of A Summer’s Night, and the fairy tale of the three little pigs, Boxman uses Abe’s novel as an investigation into how to create something - a home, an artwork - and the tensions between solitude and community.

The work was designed to adapt to different spaces and pack up into the back of a van, with two overhead projectors, an accordion and a wardrobe box, and it toured bars, shopfronts, warehouses as well as theaters.