On Thinking

Directedy by Mike Levin, et al.

What could a play about thought look like? How could a theatrical experience get an audience to wonder about what the mind does? How do we even begin to think about what we are doing?

"On Thinking" began during a National Endowment for the Humanities summer program for teachers entitled “The Political Theory of Hannah Arendt” held at Bard College in July 2012. Creator and director Mike Levin was one of 15 educators from across the country selected to participate in the seminar. Having wrote several scenes and meditating on the play for a year, Levin sent out and received back nearly 50 questionnaires from people around the country to see what we are thinking about and why we think the way we do. "On Thinking" includes direct material from those questionnaires, as well as historical events, future hypotheses, and dance pieces based on Arendt’s masterpiece The Human Condition.

The result is a movement-dance-theatre multimedia collage that explores how technology – from Sputnik to the Singularity – affects our thoughts and even our mortality.

A maelstrom. An impossible puzzle. A 90-minute genre-bending experience that binds nineteen of FALA’s finest actors into a single unit.