Venice, CA

sago i-iii

Friedman’s bleak comedy, Sago Plastico, is a three-part live performance series that uses video + sound, movement and audience interviews. A garden of potted plants live inside a walled garden. The garden is run by a gardener who the plants have trouble respecting. Sago Plastico addresses the experience of weighing the comforts of living by psychic attachments to social constructs and patriarchal agendas versus mobilizing for one's own purpose.

Sago Plastico i-Sago Plastico iii, May - Septempber 2017
Video, found and recorded sound, flora, paper, colored pencil, performance in a garden

Told by plants through a plant transmitter, Sago inquires into the confines of comfort zones. In order to escape the authority they’ve outgrown under the gardener’s supervision, the plants recognize their complacency and speculate to form a collective vision and plan for transcending the garden walls.

an excerpt:

“We envied the lawn grass. No not the LONG grass, the grass on the lawn in the gardener's front yard. All it knew was two inches. Everything it needed, everything it was, everything it wanted, which was respectfully based on every blade around it—all of that—was two inches. The minute one blade peeked atop the crew cut of its obedient green fellows, the Gardener and his mower brought it back down to the level of the others. And the blade and the Gardener lived satisfied with its humility via uniformity.”

A projector casts the choreographic video behind the live choreography—human dancers forming a plant tableau. Recordings of the gardener’s instructions dictate rudimentary movements to the live performers until they break into their own choreo. Sago was performed three times at Beyond Baroque in Venice, CA. Twice in the walled Poet’s Garden and finally in the front garden where a 16-foot ladder marked the plants’ exit from the garden’s confines.

_{PLANTS (video)
Jazmine Bailey

Iris Alden
Miranda Friedman
Kadesha Goins
Esa Lewis
Stephanie Montero
Yasmin Onbirback
Annie Pho
Diandra Torres

VIDEOGRAPHY (film)
Trenton Foon
Miranda Friedman

SOUND DESIGN
Roy Sugihara

STYLING + MAKE UP + HAIR
Adeel Khan
Annie Pho

ILLUSTRATIONS
Iris Alden

STORY + SCREENPLAY
+ DIRECTION + SET
Miranda Friedman

PLANTS (performers)
(Sago i)
Jazmine Bailey
Annie Pho
Savannah Washington

(Sago ii)
Rachel Celotto
Neda Yazdani
Negin Yazdani

Miranda Friedman (Sago i - iii)

CHOREOGRAPHY
Jazmine Bailey
Annie Pho
Miranda Friedman

PLANT VOICES
Jazmine Bailey
Miranda Friedman
Annie Pho

GARDENER VOICES
Conrad Cunningham
Vince Roush

MOTHER NATURE VOICE
Sylvie Targhetta

VFX (film)
Dante Graves

LIVE SCORE
Myra Hasson (DIGITAL SOUND ART) (Sago i)
Dillon Cahill (BANJO) (Sago ii)

Emma Diamond (BASS + SYNTH)(Sago iii)

VIDEOGRAPHY (event)
Shira Shane (Sago i-ii)
Dante Graves (Sago iii)}

SAGO PLASTICO - September 2017 Teaser.