Project/ Best Life

Performance, 2022

Best Life is a new, relational show performed by an audience for an audience, inspired by the machines that make our lives better. What if these domestic machines could whisper to us the stories of the people they are caring for? In Best Life, they become the audience’s companions—everyday ‘R2D2s’ that teach us how to perform the show for each other. Scenes emerge that reveal a suburban neighbourhood, over a span of 50 years—an origami of everyday objects that the audience interacts with, to build a shared narrative of longing in this moment. An intimate and participatory audience experience that will simultaneously take you back into the past, as well as forward into the far far future, Best Life also asks a much bigger question about what it is we are leaving behind.

Built for an intimate audience experience, Best Life offers a unique performance experience, that gently casts the group as a neighbourhood, intersecting their own personal histories, memories and associations with the objects in the room and the unfolding narrative, centred around the lives of two people, who came to this place in search of something better. There is also an opportunity for a local performer/writer/personality to play a special role in the show for each performance.

Best Life was developed through LIFT’s Concept Touring Digital Residency, the Deer Lake Artist’s Residency and through the Shadlbolt Centre for the Arts.

Created by TR’s Artistic Director Maiko Yamamoto, in collaboration with Antoine Bedard, Arthi Chandra, Itai Erdal and Keely O’Brien.

Drawings by Keely O’Brien
Photos by Chelsey Stuyt
Video by Emma Pollard

WORLD PREMIERE
Studio Theatre
Shadbolt Centre for the Arts
November 2-5, 2022 @ 8pm
BURNABY

For more info about Best Life, please contact maiko@theatrereplacement.org