City Writes a Play
The Reanimation of the Commons
created by the City of Santa Cruz
envisioned and facilitated by Aleksandra Wolska

   
 
I.
We all live somewhere. But where is this somewhere?   What does it meant to live somewhere, or anywhere? When we say “we live here” what do we mean by “here” or "live" for that matter? What do we mean by our “locality”?
II.
City Writes a Play seeks to restore our human and more than human habitat to its inherent aliveness and relationality, illuminating the multi-dimensionality of spaces we inhabit, from ecological, social and historical to affective and sacred. It invites all those who participate into a conscious shift from separation to interdependence with all that exists, where togetherness becomes a chief creative agency to build a dynamic whole. 
 A multidisciplinary, collaborative venture, it is modeled after the Medieval Cycle Plays, where cities did in fact create communal performances engaging the cosmic sphere in its larger-than human, mythical dimension, bringing it down into a lived reality of a city. We are resurrecting that convention as a multivocal, artistic effort of a city as a whole that chooses to tell its story and describe its own cosmology. This undertaking replaces the old paradigm of inert, meant-for-exploitation world by the cosmic sphere as alive, multidimensional, relational and dynamic habitat of giving and receiving. It changes the cultural narrative of dominance over our surroundings into an animate, multidimensional reality of their co-creation. 
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​​THE PERFORMER
play and film
written and directed by Aleksandra Wolska

An actor dies on stage and finds himself trapped in the theater of his own mind,
searching for a new way to perform a world. 

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​THE FEAST OF THE HUNGRY GHOSTS

​Recovering the Earth Within
a play for actors and nature
written and directed by Aleksandra Wolska 

An exploration of addiction to just about everything within the depleted biosphere of the collective psyche.