The Chocolate Factory Theater Will Present YOUR GHOST BODY in February 2026
Your Ghost Body is both a video game, hand-made by Syers, and an analog performance in which the audience collectively acts as the player.
The Chocolate Factory Theater continues its Spring 2026 season with the premiere of Your Ghost Body, a new video game and accompanying evening-length performance by interdisciplinary artist Karinne Keithley Syers.
Karinne Keithley Syers, a long time (and Bessie Award winning) contributor to the NYC experimental performance community, returns to The Chocolate Factory Theater with the premiere of Your Ghost Body, a hand-made video game (which will be released on digital platforms) and accompanying live performance.
Your Ghost Body is both a video game, hand-made by Syers, and an analog performance in which the audience collectively acts as the player. A memory palace in the form of a playable junkyard, its live medium is luminous radio, working the edge between sound, text, song, and projection. Its poetics come from the vestiges of afternoon TV game shows and text adventure games. Built as a way to index what remains, as psychic possession, of the landscape of childhood and adolescence, it asks what to do in middle age with a vestigial homing instinct for a place no longer inhabited. Your Ghost Body summons the figures carried in memory as a cloud of ghost bodies: past selves, selves we didn't become, and the presences of both the dead and the still living who formed something in us. The game makes a space for a brief communion, pivoting from the author's memories to the audience's.
At The Chocolate Factory Theater, the game will be performed (and played) live.
Created by Karinne Keithley Syers with collaborators: Kate Benson (performer), John Gasper (performer), Aviva Jaye (performer), and Sara Walsh (designer).
* “Created by” covers writing, sound, video, animation, programming, performance, and graphic design.
Karinne Keithley Syers last appeared at The Chocolate Factory Theater with the premiere of A Tunnel Year in 2016; and previously, with Another Tree Dance in 2013.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Karinne Keithley Syers makes performance and satellite variations on performance in print, radio, and new media. Recent work includes the libretto for The Lydian Gale Parr, the short film, Henry at the Golden Hour, and My Address is Still Walton, a feature-length film seen at the Redentore Festival at the 2024 Venice Biennale. She is an alumnus of New Dramatists. Her chamber opera, Montgomery Park, or Opulence, won a Bessie Award for Outstanding Production in 2011, after its 2010 run at Incubator Arts Project. Her performance work has also been seen at The Chocolate Factory Theater, Danspace Project at St. Marks, St. Ann's Warehouse, Dixon Place, P.S. 122, La MaMa E.T.C., innumerable installations of Catch, several Little Theaters at Tonic, The Ohio Theater's Ice Factory festival, Surf Reality, and Ur, a dance palace she co-founded with Chris Yon. Her audio work has aired on WFMU and the Australian Broadcast Network's Soundproof, and was included in McSWeeney's Quarterly 64: The Audio Issue. As a performer and designer, she has collaborated with David Neumann, Young Jean Lee, Big Dance Theater, Sibyl Kempson, The Civilians, Talking Band, Yoshiko Chuma, Sara Smith, Chris Yon, Ivy Baldwin, and Theater of a Two-Headed Calf. She is the founding editor of 53rd State Press and the founder of The Pelagic School. She has a Ph.D in English from the CUNY Graduate Center, and an MFA in Playwriting from Brooklyn College, where she studied with Mac Wellman. She has spent most of her working life teaching and the last fourteen years being a parent. She currently teaches sixth grade and co-directs the theater club at a boarding middle school for boys.
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