Over a time-bending 90 minutes, “[siccer]’s” live performance slides deftly along a spectrum of drama and comedy with a wily sense of control. Rawls’s opening monologue establishes a central premise of the work: toggling between “interior” and “exterior,” spoken as framing devices for scenes in a film script. A stop-motion film shoot serves as setting, with stylized green screen curtains containing one corner of green floor activated by mobile green rectangular frames of varying sizes and degrees of transparency. Two soundboard stations stand in the opposite corner at something of a visual remove, yet still in dynamic interplay as they are activated by performers and sound designers Holland Andrews and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste. Open yet contained, this arena hosts vulnerabilities and desires to navigate tensions and confrontations that challenge given dualities at telescoping scales: self/other, director/performer, individual/community, humanity/ecology.

Confluences of sound, light, and movement clarify and confuse boundaries between “interior” and “exterior,” jostling these seemingly bounded dimensions into an unstable emulsion. The iterative layers, loops, and distortions in Andrews and Toussaint-Baptiste's live vocal and electronic score contrast with a metronomic click track that evolves with each recurrence from mechanical to organic sounds. Ecological soundscapes bloom to evoke a swamp among scattered sprigs of cattails and ferns, giving way to the throbbing bass and driving pulse of an underground dance club. Space is further destabilized by color as Maggie Heath’s masterful lighting casts unsettling tones—a diffuse wash of pink, a vibrant red-orange blaze, directional color beams aimed from mobile multicolor LEDs—over the lurid green-screen neons of the set and the variable greens of Saša Kovačević and Dana Doughty’s stylishly idiosyncratic costumes. Slowly morphing landscapes of movement and shadow reflect oscillations between sonic saturation and tense silence; sudden shifts between color cues, murky darks, and frank brightness delineate or blur changes in scene and tone to establish or defy palettes of legibility and estrangement.