Too Close to the Sun: Zoology

ABOUT THE EVENT

When artist Talya Rubin was a child, and adults would ask her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she would tell them: “a ballerina and a gorilla”. Now that she is all grown up—in a time of systems collapse—she is making Zoology to finally live up to her childhood dream of gracefulness and wildness.

Zoology is a subverted performance lecture and dance work about wildness and extinction, as experienced by one woman and two children. It aims to provoke a deep, visceral re-connection with our wild natures and to invite audiences to sit in the uncomfortable and unresolved spaces of the current extinction crisis. 

The work is inspired by found slides taken at the Bronx Zoo in the 1980s, as well as Margaret Thatcher’s refusal to transport a panda to America on her first diplomatic trip to visit Ronald Reagan in 1981. It also weaves in childhood stories about New York City, tangential associations with The Wizard of Oz, and the history of menageries. 

One woman, two children, a white space that fractures into a rainbow of colours. Zoology is a lecture and dance performance that offers a poetic, absurdist and unsettling reflection on wildness, extinction and our place in the natural world.