floodlines

floodlines, austin, TX (2004-2010)

Creator/Director/Performer

“The work, which I experienced last spring, has the feel of a waking dream, making the familiar unfamiliar, drenching the known in mystery and opening one to wonder and change.” —The Austin Chronicle

“floodlines is [. . .] a gift to all of us who have been afraid to venture into the salt ocean of our familial, historical grief, for fear we would drown. Pryor swims for us, and throws a line from the other side.” —The Austin-American Statesman

“I felt my throat close with a kind of love and wonder [...] past these amazingly clear, utterly compelling images, tableaux that changed my relationship to my world." —Jill Dolan, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies

A multi-site specific and community-engaged performance, staged once-a-year for seven consecutive years. Unfolded on the streets, lawns, and alleyways of a quiet residential neighborhood in Austin, Texas.  Audience traveled through the performance as a funeral processional of cars as staged vignettes popped up in the passing landscape.  Performance explored themes of Jewish migration, grief and loss, and how memory works.  

Presented by the University of Texas Department of Theatre and Dance and Fusebox Festival, supported by a grant from the City of Austin Division of Cultural Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and individual donors.

Featured in the Austin Chronicle: “The Exit Interview” (2010), “Floodlines: I Was in Hyde Park But It Wasn’t Hyde Park” (2009), and “Floodlines: Hyde Park Again Awash in Wonders” (2007); L Style G Style Magazine: “Portrait of an Artist” (2008); Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies: “Colleague Criticism” (2009); Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History: “Following the Ghosts: Repetition, Return, and the Disordering of America in floodlines” (2017).