Inspired by the literary concept of the unreliable narrator and the medieval bestiary, The Unreliable Bestiary is an ark of stories about animals, humans, and planet Earth. With a team of award-winning collaborators, Art and Design Professor Deke Weaver’s life-long project presents a performance for every letter of the alphabet, each representing an endangered animal or habitat. Funny, dark, and haunting, CETACEAN (The Whale) - The Unreliable Bestiary’s sixth performance - will feature a large-scale video projection, dance, and live sound design while interweaving tales of the sea and failing ecosystems. Over the past two years, hundreds of local students have listed their hopes and fears in CETACEAN workshops. Students burned the lists of fear, made origami stars from the lists of hope, and filled discarded plastic bottles with the ash of fear and the stars of hope. We’ll suspend thousands of these messages in a bottle in the cavernous University of Illinois Stock Pavilion and tell our stories under a sea of hope and fear.
