Icarus and Other Party Tricks takes place in the world of therapeutic culture, where the rhetoric of healing is ubiquitous. Grinalds’ play nods at the stretching repression of trauma, diagrams of avoidant and anxious attachment styles, and the variety of psychoactives in shining armor. She notes that despite familiarity with the therapeutic vocabulary, which seems to offer diagnoses, roadmaps, and solutions, many still struggle with healing. In the new ubiquity of therapeutic culture, audiences encounter the new protagonist: deeply traumatized, aware of said trauma, and yet traumatized nonetheless.

Semi-produced at Princeton University. Explores late bloomers, Kafka, climate change, and familial catharsis. Especially influenced by surrealist eco-political texts and therapeutic culture.

Choreography and soundscape produced at Trinity College Dublin.

What does it mean to climb into the uncanny, to feel safe and held within its embrace? When we do not know or trust ourselves, the uncanny may become a new comfort, (m)othering us. The Absconding seeks to capture the tension between carnal entanglement and self-estrangement, reaching into the third space: a home in the unheimlich.

The swoop from virginity to motherhood is well known; religious and psychoanalytical archetypes outline the lenses with which to interpret stories and scrutinize (or, as Hélène Cixous argues, despise) women. But what follows, when the angst and desire held in the male gaze driving archetypes starts to wane, when for women with wrinkles, there is not a common counterpart to silver fox’s allure, there is not even interest? Without desire complexes to categorize older women, do their stories end?