Nick Jonczak

New Paradise Laboratories (NPL) will present Hello Blackout!, a world premiere integrating contingency—accident, chance, and improvisation—into NPL's physical theater style. Conceived by the company's artistic director Whit MacLaughlin and composer Bhob Rainey, both Pew Fellows, the work will be "part horror story and part philosophical investigation into what is knowable and what is beyond our ability even to contemplate," according to NPL. A live chamber ensemble will perform Rainey's "ornery yet architecturally rich" computer-generated score. Hello Blackout! centers on anomalous triplets who live in a derelict mansion made of numbers, far from those who lead conventional, non-mathematical lives. Under the watchful eye of "Moth," the siblings communicate in a private language comprised of body sounds and semaphore. Hello Blackout! is grounded in a philosophical and artistic investigation of contingency which NPL conducted through a 2015 Center Discovery grant.