Mass Live Arts - Gallery: 'Eternal'

In July 2013, the acclaimed director Daniel Fish assembled a film crew to shoot Thomas Jay Ryan and Christina Rouner performing the final scene of the cult film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. For two hours, the performers were told to keep going, no matter what happens. Eternal, first presented in 2013 at the Incubator Arts Project, is the unedited, two-channel video of their performance.

The lines appropriated by Fish in the video are the only thing that remains constant. Everything else "pacing, tone, body language, timing, voice inflections, facial expressions"change with each iteration, coloring the text with a different, unexpected meaning. The performers, previously seen together in Fish's 2011 piece Tom Ryan Thinks He's James Mason Starring in a Movie by Nicholas Ray, turn the obsessive repetition into a master class in performance, transforming the potentially tedious exercise into an ode to the contours the human heart.

Admission is free.

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