EUPHOR!UM

EUPHOR!UM (Presidio)

The EUPHOR!UM sold-out its initial ten-week run in the Bay Area and excerpts from the show were a hit at the 2001 Burning Man Festival. Now the show returns to its former home in Building 920 in The Presidio facing Crissy Field.

The “EUPHOR!UM,” is a multi-media adventure that weds multiple audio and visual techniques to create a three-dimensional interactive dreamscape that you can walk through. It’s part performance, part installation art, based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s opium-induced poem Kubla Khan. more

Inside the EUPHOR!UM you move through a series of environmental chambers where illusory images float before your eyes and then shift and reshape in kaleidoscopic forms. Each chamber contains an infrared beacon, which triggers your digital audio player to emit a site-specific soundscape containing fragments of the poem’s text, voices, music, and sound effects. The resulting experience is a hallucinogenic trip through Xanadu from inside the poet’s imagination. Artistic Director Chris Hardman says, “In adapting this poem to our newest technology, we are not only creating an original form, but are bringing the experience of this wonderful poem to several new generations.”

The EUPHOR!UM includes some new features as yet unseen by the thousands who’ve already experienced the show, as well as a special “Opium Lounge” for patrons to enjoy exotic food and drink in a special salon atmosphere after the experience. Call 415-332-9454 for tickets and more information or visit www.antenna-theater.org.

ANTENNA has been creating site-specific events and spectacles around the Bay Area for the past 20 years. Best known for inventing “Walkmanology,” ANTENNA specializes in experiential productions that defy the boundaries of theater. One of their most successful productions was the Alcatraz Cellhouse Tour, a theatrical audio experience that still serves twenty years later as the main tour of the island.

ANTENNA’s use of electronic media, oversized masks, puppets, sculptures and interview-driven sound designs have garnered the company six Bay Area Critics Circle awards, residencies at the Smithsonian Institution’s Experimental Gallery, the Spoleto USA Festival, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Performing Garage in New York, the MIT Media Lab, and a spot as one of six theater companies invited to perform at the 1984 Olympics. Internationally, Antenna has toured to festivals in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Mexico.