how keanu reeves saved the world (2010-2011)
Created and Performed by Amanda Monfooe
Performed by Lottie Maslin-Prothero
Music by Glynn Forrest
How Keanu Reeves Saved the World is a performance project first developed for a Scratch Night at the Arches (Glasgow) in March 2010. It was developed further for a September 2010 premiere at Arches Live, a festival of new theatre and performance from Scotland-based artists. You can find the Programme here. This project is generously supported by Puppet Animation Scotland and attendees of the 2010 Pony Pie Fête, which you can learn about here.
In March 2011 the piece was developed with support from Glasgow University’s Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies. Special thanks go to Professor Simon Murray for his personal and artistic support in bringing the show to the university community and a wider public audience. Pictures from this production can be seen below.
In the performance, the theatre becomes a lecture hall and the audience become students as The Speaker pilots her pupils through the confusion and pain of postmodernity as the real unravels. Who will come to the rescue? Who other than Keanu Reeves.
How Keanu Reeves Saved the World sees The Speaker unpick her uneasy experience of reality through a prismatic analysis of Hollywood celebrity Keanu Reeves. In an extensive examination of the actor’s films she draws parallels between her own doubts, fears, and anxieties about contemporary life and the themes and characters in the movies. But as her links grow more and more tenuous her authoritative analysis becomes a barely veiled confession: what she knows to be true and real has become blurred with what she desires to feel and believe. As the image, the spectacle, and the fictional – the compass points by which she’d navigated the world – are exposed as fabrications based on nothing, everything is called into question and The Speaker is lost for words. To recover herself and finish the lecture she turns to what she understands: Keanu Reeves.
Using puppetry, masks and object manipulation this highly visual performance uses the foibles of one individual to anchor a more broad critique of a post-industrial culture that has been plunged so far into “the desert of the real” that life itself has become a mere object. Surreal and often whimsical, this performance aims to interrogate the supremacy of the spectacle and the authority of the image, cultural developments that have acted as incurable ulcers in the belly of mankind as evidenced in the first decade of the 21st century’s parade of wars and climactic disasters. Each year yields another shameful rebuttal of empathy and humility as we remove ourselves from the physical truths of life and death by greater and greater distances. Meta-theatrical and popular culture literate, How Keanu Reeves Saved the World serves as a warning that as other living beings and the planet itself are objectified, dehumanized, and disregarded only the delusional and the liars will be comforted before death.
Click here to read Gareth Vile’s four star review and check out The Herald’s review here.
