Paradise Container
Mara Mckevitt & Monica Mirabile
Staged across a sprawling set that mimics a deconstructed home, Paradise Container tells the story of a family shaped by addiction and financial enmeshment with a storage solutions company that contracts each of its members. Conceived and written by Monica Mirabile and Mara Mckevitt, the newly commissioned performance takes place within the Main Hall of Pioneer Works—reimagined here as a cross between a soundstage and an American fulfillment warehouse.
Paradise Container guides the audience from room to room through light, sound, and performance cues. Charged domestic scenes collapse boundaries between the personal, domestic, and professional environments that define daily life. In this universe, an eroding nuclear family must meet the demands of a modern yet feudal work arrangement, navigate the oscillatory effects of a pharmaceutical drug called Shift, and learn how to live with and love each other. An intimate, performance-theater experience intended for only eighty audience members at a time, Paradise Container crafts a narrative meant to chafe at ideas of stability and disillusion, sickness and health, and the myth of work-life balance.
Paradise Container lasts approximately 70 minutes, and requires audience mobility. Seating will not be available, however the performance does permit wheelchair access.
Please also note that this performance contains nudity and explicit material. It is open for all ages, however viewer discretion is strongly advised. Doors open an hour before each performance.
Performers: Tim Allan, Sigrid Lauren, Maya Martinez, Tara-Jo Tashna,
Julian Townley, Anna Thérèse Witenberg
Composer and Sound Design: Aaron David Ross
Lighting Design: Sarai Frazier
Designer: Charlie Robinson
Makeup: Nat Carlson
Stage Manager: Sharleen Chidiac
Producer: Erin Leland
About the artists
Mara McKevitt is a writer, filmmaker and artist. She has made work under various names which focus on authorship, labor, and copyright across film, PR, documentation and propaganda. Her work has been shown in venues including but not limited to: Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf; Metrograph, New York; Clementin Seedorf, Cologne; Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles; Conditions, Toronto; Now Instant Image Hall, Los Angeles; and Amant, Brooklyn. Her work has been the subject of review in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Document Journal, The Whitney Review, Animal Blood, Dazed Magazine, Dirty Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications.
Monica Mirabile is a movement director, choreographer and artist whose productions explore performance as behavior. Her work focuses on processing and regulating the nervous system within the slow motion coup of a collapsing state, often accompanied by audio composition and scenographic installation. Deeply collaborative, her practice elaborates on how authority, power, and support operate inside the body. Mirabile is also a painter, and one half of the performance duo Fluct with Sigrid Lauren. She has performed and exhibited at the Guggenheim, Broad Museum, MoMA PS1, Art Basel Miami, ICA Philadelphia, NADA, and the Queens Museum, among others. She has worked with musicians that include The Weeknd, Mitski, SOPHIE, Blood Orange, Eartheater, Yaeji, and Maggie Rogers. In 2014, Mirabile founded Otion Front Studio, a community rehearsal space in Brooklyn. In 2023 she co-founded ‘This is a Performance School’ and is currently the Director of Open Movement at Performance Space New York.