Catherine Sullivan, Sean Griffin
The Chittendens

Working frequently with composer Sean Griffin, Catherine Sullivan's works engage a variety of media - theater, film, video, photography, writing and sculpture. Sullivan and Griffin have produced several performances and theater works wherein the performers are often coping with written texts, stylistic economies, reenactments of historic performances, gestural and choreographic regimes, and conceptual orthodoxies.

The Chittendens (2005) derives its mise en scene from Thorstein Veblen's book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) and was shot in a liquidated office building in Chicago and at an abandoned lighthouse on Poverty Island. The piece consists of choreography and music and vocal arrangements developed with Sean Griffin. The actors rehearsed gestures and attitudes and performed them as a musician would, following a precise score. The piece hopes to create suspense between the actors' execution of the score and its automation of them. The costumes are drawn from a range of managerial and leisure class archetypes and this animates the setting, shot as it was found, an office building filled only with the strange material cast offs of American business culture. In the scenes at Poverty Island, a sea captain is melancholic because the lighthouse is in decay. The iconography that is supposed to envelope him is crumbling. He can't resuscitate his metaphor, and neither can we, the metaphoric.