Motion Lab in ACCAD

OASIS is the third in a series of performance and technology works created by Professor Norah Zuniga Shaw for Livable Futures. The creative team includes Byron Au Yong, internationally renowned contemporary artist who has composed an improvised song-cycle for OASIS drawing on his experience in Chinese and Korean vocal traditions and Zuniga Shaw’s background in North American folk music and Jewish ritual practices. The work responds directly to grief and loss associated with the pandemic and climate crisis and the need for both recovery and transformative change.

Resisting dominant narratives of disaster and decline, it offers a soft space for turning to toward the issues at hand. Participants are bathed in sound, stars, stories, and sensation in this 90-minute immersive experience for rest and recovery in uncertain times. Warm water flows through the themes of the work but so does mirage and the impermanence and precarity of any site of refuge on the planet today. The literal and figurative metaphors of physical and emotional oases provide fertile ground for the imagination.

accad.osu.edu/research-gallery/oasis