Romi Sarfaty and Dale Williamson: The Pathetic Planet

An ancient Ameoba pulsates in the warm rays of the smiling sun.
She sings to it “Please Amoeba, please be born!”
But in this galaxy, even the stars themselves are afraid to fall asleep and wake up in their worst nightmare, where bobbling heads spin and cackle, where smiles gape alongside our shameful pleasures, where skin sheds and reveals monstrous innards.

We tried to have it all and yet we’re trapped in this spiral of nothing, trapped in this futile selfhood, trapped in this multitude of reflections.
A chain of stick people holding hands,
empty shapes screaming
“It’s not at all traumatic to be a part of the picture”.

So please, join us in this operatic, absurdist melodrama.
Put on your hysteric smile.
Come along, let’s all try and act like it’s okay,
Everything is okay.
Everything is totally okay,
We are all so happy,
We love our life.
We love The Pathetic Planet.

Devised by Romi Sarfaty and Dale Williamson.
Performed by Romi Sarfaty, Dale Williamson and opera performer Ilona Sofia Năstase.
Composed by Flynn Butler.

Romi Sarfaty and Dale Williamson

Dale Williamson and Romi Sarfaty are a collaborative duo of multidisciplinary performance/visual artists. Their work explores the building of new worlds and mythologies, centred around lateral thinking and the images that accompany our streams of consciousness.

Working passionately with absurdity, abstraction and melodrama they create stories that are a flurry of fantastical dreams, nightmares and new arrangements of reality. These stories are materialised in a range of mediums; video art, craft, movement and text. Their otherworldly sets, costumes and personas express extreme feelings of love, anguish and melancholia. Their practice is further driven by working with their authentic state of self, incorporating unashamedly neurodivergent ‘accidents’ and ‘mistakes’.

The pair’s practice is rooted in gratitude for what there is and, resisting the impulse to focus on what there isn’t. Considering the visual as the most crucial way of thinking; working alongside artists, non-artists, friends, lovers and their surrounding landscapes and sceneries. They unrelentingly explore methods of existing and evolving in these tumultuous times.

The Pathetic Planet is part of Into the New 2024, a festival of contemporary performance made in Glasgow. Into the New showcases the work by the final year BA (Hons) Contemporary Performance Practice students from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Accessibility

Content Warnings: Partial nudity, Smoke and Haze
Trigger Warnings: References to explicit sexual topics. Detailed descriptions/references to extreme political topics.

This work will be subtitled.