HOW TO LIVE (after you die)

HOW TO LIVE (after you die) was planned to be staged in an intimate theatrical environment in the Egyptian Theatre, on site at Sundance 2022. The experience would have involved enveloping color fields emitted via immersive projection, intriguing graphic text, captivating imagery and the Artist—Lynette Wallworth—alone on an unvarnished stage. With the advent of the Festival going virtual, just two weeks before opening day, the artist and her team swiftly pivoted to translate the once-live performance to a feature-length film, in just 7 days. That pivot means this new work will now be accessible to anyone who creates an account with Sundance International Film Festival anywhere in the world, free of charge, for the duration of the festival after its premiere. Even with the change in medium, Lynette builds intimacy with her audience through humor, tenderness, and a compelling authenticity. As she reveals her personal history she evocatively calls into relief the spectre of global politics in a world of increasing polarization. One woman’s journey into the labyrinth of religious zealotry and back provides a reckoning with the creeping forces of extremism and the hard won lessons of following one’s own path.

ARTIST STATEMENT

A few years ago I was sitting in the home of a friend describing the unsettling impact of seeing someone from my long-ago past and the difficult, complicated memories it had stirred. It was in part, a love story that ended in a Christian cult. She handed me a book on memoir writing, then left me in her apartment to stay while she traveled interstate. By the end of that weekend, I had read the book and this work had begun. It’s never been my wish to tell my own story, but as sometimes happens, the times we are living through kept reminding me of a life I had long left behind. Increasingly I heard stories of friends and family being lost to extremist groups and the severing of ties that seemed unbreakable. I watched the reports on growing groups of ‘believers’ who felt they had to act to save a world from conspiracy theories that seemed to me completely implausible and yet had captivated millions. I heard political leaders using language designed to register with the devoted who believe that have inside knowledge on the invisible plans of God. In every one of these stories, I recognized myself. So I dragged my memories out from where they had been stored. The purpose of art is to take the singular, find the universal and connect. With this story, for better or worse, I am uniquely positioned to know the way down the rabbit hole and, thankfully, the path out of it. So here is a new work, transformed from a live performance into a film in seven days. To premiere at Sundance, the second festival of the extremely insightful and funny Tabitha Jackson who handed me a book a few years ago, before she was the director of this festival, and told me to think about writing my story.....

ARTIST BIO

LYNETTE WALLWORTH is an Emmy® Award-winning artist whose practice spans video installation, photography and film. Her immersive environments bring together cutting edge “technological advances and ancient understandings, new media and old practices, electronics and the electricity of human touch” to reflect connections between people and the natural world and explore fragile human states of grace. Notable works include virtual-reality films AWAVENA (Premiered at 2018 Sundance Film Festival, Emmy® Award-Winner for Outstanding New Approaches to Documentary) and COLLISIONS (Premiered at 2016 Sundance Film Festival, Emmy® Award-Winner for Outstanding New Approaches to Documentary), the fulldome planetarium presentation CORAL (2012) winner of a DOMIE for best fulldome artwork, and the interactive installation EVOLUTION OF FEARLESSNESS (2006). In 2014, Wallworth’s feature documentary TENDER won the AACTA Award for Best Televised Documentary. Wallworth’s work has been presented internationally at festivals and exhibitions including the World Economic Forum at Davos, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian, Venice Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, London Film Festival, the Auckland Triennial, Melbourne International Arts Festival, the Sydney Festival, Arnolfini, The Young Vic and Festival d’Aix en Provence. She has been awarded an International Fellowship from Arts Council England, a New Media Arts Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts, the inaugural Australian Film, Television and Radio School Creative Fellowship and the Joan and Kim Williams Documentary Fellowship. In 2016,Wallworth was awarded a UNESCO City of Film Award, the Byron Kennedy Award for Innovation and Excellence, and was named as one of the “100 Leading Global Thinkers’ of the year by Foreign Policy magazine. She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Augmented and Virtual Reality and the Director of the Forum’s New Narratives Lab, a Fellowship to support underrepresented voices to move into cultural leadership. Wallworth is a Trustee of the Sundance Institute.