SARAH SATURDAY
This is gardening, not architecture.
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THE GALAXY CUT (2024)

The Galaxy Cut is a performance adaptation of a novelization for a movie that doesn’t exist. The novelization (which does exist, in unpublished form), written by Dan Hoy, is a first-person, five-act immersion into the real-time/end-times of dreams, campsites, rest stops, galleries, subway cars, satellites, communes and soundtracks. It’s narrated by Noel (28, NYC), who embarks on a journey of self-discovery after a chance encounter with a stranger she recognizes from a series of apocalyptic dreams. Together, they navigate an increasingly destabilized reality as traumatic events from her past resurface and intersect with an impending, unknown cataclysm.

The performance adaptation strips out most of the narrative scaffolding and focuses on the immersive experience of time: the emotional topographies, thought spirals, dream logics, soundscapes, and vibes.

As the narration of each scene unfolds, the dancers of Garage Co. (Kristen Carrara, McKay House, Emma Morrison, and Amanda Reichert) embody the words and feelings of each scene through movement choreographed to an original film score by Sarah Saturday (Gardening, Not Architecture). The stage is set by a dream-like sequence of videos edited together by Saturday.

The Galaxy Cut is a movie distilled to its elements — narration, sound, projection, movement, and stillness – and experienced by the audience as a collective, imaginative act of creation.

THE MUSIC

Dan Hoy originally approached Sarah Saturday about collaborating on a live performance of The Galaxy Cut in 2023. For that performance, Saturday created an original film score and color bar projections to accompany the spoken word piece. The original 35-minute performance took place at Random Sample in September, 2023.

For the Brave New Works Lab at OZ Arts in 2024, the length was shortened to 28 minutes. Some of the pieces from the original score will be available for streaming later in 2024.

THE CAST

DAN HOY

Dan Hoy is a writer whose books include the poetic trilogy The Deathbed Editions (Octopus Books, 2016), and the collaborative novel Where the Sky Meets the Ocean and the Air Tastes Like Metal and the Birds Don't Make a Sound (Trnsfr Books, 2021), co-written with Mike Kleine. His work has appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading and other anthologies and magazines, and his poetry collection The Terraformers (Third Man Books, 2017) was the recipient of an Elgin Award by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association.

SARAH SATURDAY

Sarah Saturday is an interdisciplinary musician, producer, writer, and performance artist known by her stage name, Gardening, Not Architecture. A recipient of the Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship (FY2024), Sarah has made a name for herself in the Nashville performance art community with her deeply vulnerable, complex, visually stunning performances. She has released several albums, singles, remixes, videos, films, and multimedia performances since 2007, and played over 200 shows in the U.S. and Canada since 2009. She has scored music for film and TV, including creating the original scores for the Discovery Channel documentary Dark Side of the Sun and the feature film Superpowerless. Her music has been placed in dozens of films, TV shows, and commercials. In 2012, Sarah relocated to Nashville from Los Angeles. Her most recent release is a 40-minute solo multimedia visual album performance piece entitled Voyage (2023).

GARAGE CO.

Garage Collective is a Nashville, TN, based movement group co-founded by freelance dance artists Kristen Carrara, McKay House, Emma Morrison, and Amanda Reichert. Since their inception in the Fall of 2022, they have been commissioned to create improvisational structures for live performance in locations ranging from art galleries to local music venues. As their collective is regularly housed for rehearsal and creation in an unconventional space, they have been open to receive diverse performance opportunities that reflect the varying artistic backgrounds and interests held individually by each of the collaborators, ranging from contact improvisation, various forms of contemporary, modern dance, floorwork, theatrical embodiment, and visual art construction. Most recently, they have performed in collaboration with local musicians at Nelson Drum Shop, Soft Junk, The Blue Room/Third Man Records, Zeitgeist Gallery, and the Nashville Pantheon.