This site allows you to explore two projects created with teens at The School of the Future in Philadelphia, PA. CHAMBERS is a visual arts project and EPIAUTOBIOGRAPHS is a theater project. Both are loosly based on an exploration of Eden Cemetary in Collingsdale, PA.

CHAMBERS with BEN VOLTA

EPIAUTOBIOGRAPHS with BRETT KEYSER

EPIAUTOBIOGRAPHS DESCRIPTION: The above video shows an exercise we explored in relation and reaction to a running dialogue about epitaphs, those concise summaries of individual lives found on headstones in our visit to Eden Cemetery. Since the general consensus seemed to be that writing our own epitaph would be too weird to contemplate, we attempted a three-word summary of how we see our life currently, working within a set of given parameters adapted from a game developed by Gianni Rodari and elaborated by Jack Zipes, called the “Fantastic Binominal”. First, we each randomly chose a PREPOSITION, then a CHARACTER TRAIT that we felt described us succinctly, and then a SUBSTANCE we felt expressed something of our essence. Starting with the character trait we then strung on the preposition and then added the substance to create our concentrated “life-phrase”. Incidentally, the “epi-” in epitaph comes to us from the Greek, where it meant “upon,” “on,” “over,” “near,” “at,” “before,” “after”—all prepositions! If we replace “-taph”, meaning tomb, with the Greek word for life, “bios”, and then indicate an artistic process by adding “-graph”, we get “epi-bio-graph”. And since we made them ourselves they are epi-AUTO-bio-graphs. Using this EPIAUTOBIOGRAPH as inspiration we then created an action (or at least “intended” to do so), put the two together and recorded the result as a small window into our work together on The Eden Project.