BAM Presents Intimate Site-Specific Performance, IN MANY HANDS

In this immersive theater experience, 51 audience members are invited to participate in tactile and multi-sensory activities and encouraged to test, listen, touch, search, and sniff throughout the work. In Many Hands was created by Kate McIntosh, a New Zealand artist whose work straddles the boundaries of performance, theater, and installation.

The piece delves into McIntosh's ongoing curiosity about physically involving an audience, and imagining a social space where individuals might explore their own agency as well as a communality. In Many Hands is part laboratory, part expedition, and part meditation that forgoes the proscenium in favor of a more flexible space where audience members take their time to engage and explore as they wish, following their noses (literally) and curiosities.

McIntosh's previous works have involved participants in many ways. Some had them break apart domestic objects and make new inventions from the fragments (Worktable, 2011). Other audiences examined the notion of collectivity by throwing furniture across the stage, uniting as an "orchestra," collecting their own bacteria, and imagining themselves as birds (All Ears, 2013). All are guided by the artist's ongoing fascination with the misuse of objects, and are imbued with a sense of playfulness and humor.

For more information visit BAM.org.