In 2019, Decameron was installed at the gigantic Coffey Studio warehouse, part of the burgeoning arts district in Red Hook Brooklyn. Previous versions had appeared at Bennington College and in excerpts at other venues. The production was co-directed by Ashley Tata and mixed by Mike Rugnetta. Performers were Starr Busby, Paul Pinto, Dax Valdes, Michael Chinworth, and Soomi Kim.

Decameron is a music/theater piece that uses earworms to create an immersive sound performance and installation. The piece is loosely based on Bocaccio’s 16th-century Decameron, in which ten youths, retreating from the plague, tell one-hundred stories. In the Decameron, interviews about earworms inspire one hundred 15-second miniatures, each an intricately designed collage. A dense sound score of samples, foley, and counting ties together the hundred fragments, and a gestural vocabulary is developed in lock-step with these 100 vignettes. The performers guide the audience and traverse the space, and the stage, an open-arena black box, is dotted with circular platforms and specially designed speaker chandeliers. letting the audience wander anywhere. The final production is an installation, lasting a half-hour, but looped for three hours, in which the audience comes and goes, ushered in by the five performers. The stage evokes something of an arena-style decathlon, charismatic possession, and a recovery ward of musical exorcism.  The end installation is a surreal, collaged yearbook of how identity is revealed through day-to-day listening, and reflects on the original Decameron’s themes of retreat and morality in a time of plague. The result is visceral theater with meticulous sound design, “operatic in scope, unfolding in layers that constantly reveal new meanings.” (Culturebot) 

The production was co-directed by Ashley Tata and mixed by Mike Rugnetta. Performers were Starr Busby, Paul Pinto, Dax Valdes, Michael Chinworth, and Soomi Kim. Images: Michael Sharkey