The Greatest Cities in the World

After the astounding interactive installation WeeTube (Microclimats), based on videos discovered on YouTube, as well as the amazing Bioboxes, a series of “cabinets of curiosities” for one spectator at a time that featured nano-narratives of stories based on interviews with recent immigrants to Canada, Theatre Replacement continues to pursue its quasi- ethnographic approach. Amassing a vast number of testimonials, James Long and Maiko Bae Yamamoto have reshaped the material, turning it into “stolen” or hijacked tales. To that end, the two directors and co-artistic directors of Theatre Replacement (who studied at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and who have worked together for the past fourteen years ) teamed up with collaborators from diverse backgrounds (actors, dancers, a musician, an architect). With their emphasis on an interdisciplinary approach, an aesthetic underlying many of the company’s principal works such as YU-FO (2007) and Train (2008), Long and Yamamoto encourage the sharing of imaginations to reveal a disconcerting Tennessee. Like their disquieting production Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut (2008), concocted from family photo albums and travel diaries found in the street, and similar to the irreverent Sexual Practices of the Japanese (2006) with its harsh yet amused anthropological viewpoint, Theatre Replacement explores reality, mingling the real and the invented to portray, in The Greatest Cities in the World, human experience.