HOMO ECONOMICUS to Feature Performance Art, Lecture, and Dance Club Experience in West Philly
Emily Bate and Obvious Agency bring a multidisciplinary performance to God’s Automatic Body & Spa in Philadelphia.
Homo Economicus, a multi-disciplinary performance by Emily Bate in co-production with Obvious Agency, will be presented on Friday, May 1 at 8:30 PM at God’s Automatic Body & Spa in Philadelphia, blending performance art, live music, striptease, and immersive theatrical elements.
The piece examines the economy as expressed through our individual lives and imagines pathways to rebuilding it from the ground up. Audiences can expect a lap dancing economics professor, singing, dancing, pulsing lights, and collective conversation about economic agency.
Written and performed by singer, composer, and songleader Emily Bate, the work centers on the titular figure from Econ 101: a model meant to explain human behavior in the marketplace. Logical and self-interested, Homo Economicus exists within an economy defined by scarcity.
Homo Economicus is a co-production with one of the nation's only worker-owned theatre cooperatives, Obvious Agency, who operate at the intersection of interactive performance, democratic workplace practice, and arts worker organizing. Inside our rapidly changing global economy, audiences can come to Homo Economicus for a conversation about scarcity, cooperation, gift economies, and genuine alternatives. Dating apps, landlords, billionaires and self check-out lines are all fodder for Bate's show, as she sets our economic lives to music.
Emily Bate is a recent Barrymore Award winner, 2026 Creative Capital State of the Art Prize Winner and 2025 MacDowell Fellow whose work spans music, theater, and choral practice.
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