“Animator, dancer, and performer Miwa Matreyek’s Infinitely Yours closed out the evening. For this performance, she collaborated with SORNE, the solo act of composer, musician, and multi-media artist Morgan Sorne. Though clearly multi-hyphenates both, I still wasn’t prepared for the aural and visual bonanza that followed. Matreyek has made a name for herself by devising a mix of shadow-puppetry using her own body combined with digital animation. This amalgamation of live animation and collage techniques unfolded onto a small screen in the middle of the Egyptian’s stage, with SORNE off to the side rocking out to music, horns, bells, drums and his own voice. The room felt electric. On the screen, the images were a tour through environmental destruction and human intervention in the built environment: wildfires with animals fleeing, trucks delivering pigs to slaughterhouses, the packaging of industrial products, their eventual dumping into landfills, and so on. The associative imagery crescendoed to a clear question: “What are you waiting for?” before fading back into nature, the idyll of the beginning in the woods with woodland life scampering around.
As someone typically skeptical of the impact of anything to change hearts and minds, I still found this half an hour a galvanizing call to action to take seriously the urgency of climate disaster and tectonic shifts of the Anthropocene. It also reminded me that cinema’s origins have as much to do with live shows, entertainment like burlesque and concerts and light shows, as they do with the photographic and mechanical reproduction. The original expanded cinema has always existed in some way, and, if we can find a way to ensure our survival on this planet we’ve made hostile, will persist in the decades and centuries to come, no matter its exact form.” - by Abby Sun at Filmmaker Magazine