The Forever Project is a multidisciplinary work by Peggy Piacenza that utilizes video-installation, archival materials, and live performance to explore the non-linear, fragmented construction of identity, and the internal/external relationship of the self in connection with others.
Piacenza’s 30-year professional performance career and her history as a sex worker become an embodied tapestry of artistic material, a thematic entanglement of sex-labor, the pursuit of freedom, and ageism. Piacenza’s personal and artistic movement archives are deconstructed and exaggerated with dark humor through a satirical ecofeminism lens, in a never-ending project of self-growth and the search for purpose.
In The Forever Project, some of the characters, images, costumes and choreography are drawn from live performance and film works by Dayna Hanson, in which Piacenza was a collaborating performer. These works include Gloria’s Cause (2010), Improvement Club (2013) and The Clay Duke (2013). These characters are embodied anew in a hyper-personal exploration of touch, transaction, shame and freedom.
The performance-installation occurs inside a cube-shaped set, in which audiences, surrounded by movement and images, are immersed in a theatrical and increasingly disquieting world. Within The Forever Project, the body emerges as a container for the sacred and profane.
Video: Doug Arney
Projection Design: Leo Mayberry
Sound Design: Paurl Walsh
Lighting Design: Jessica Trundy
Performers: Peggy Piacenza, Amelia Reeber, Julia Sloane
Dramaturg: Babette Pendleton
Creative Consultant: Dayna Hanson
The Forever Project premiered January 18–21, 2024 at On the Boards, Seattle, WA.
The Forever Project is supported in part by grants from 4Culture and Seattle Office of Arts & Culture. It received generous residency support from On The Boards and Base in Seattle, WA.
The Bald Eagle, Ginger Littleton and clown characters originated in Dayna Hanson’s Gloria’s Cause, Improvement Club and The Clay Duke.