Playstructure Dreamcast is an experimental performance ensemble made up of The THR33: Melissa Achten, Patrick Michael Ballard, and Eli Klausner. As a harpist, improvisor, and composer, Melissa Achten uses performance as a divining tool for channeling work that is diaristic, intimate, and cathartic. Patrick Michael Ballard is an object based storyteller and fool magician who creates sculptural environments where folks can experience uncanny intimacy through abstract interactions in collective space. Eli Klausner is a composer who works through symbols, fantasy, and surrealism to make solo instrumental, chamber, and electronic works, often for multimedia performance. Together they weave their own practices, and the worlds from which they come, into immersive experiences that question the distinction between the arts, performance worlds and the cultural spaces that control where behaviors belong. XyxyNyxyX marks Playstructure Dreamcast’s first feature length performance as an official ensemble, bringing together 8 years of friendship, collaboration, and playing together.

XyxyxNyxyX

Three friends take a foray into defining the elusive XyxyxNyxyX through a series of vignettes that involve puppetry, homespun art objects, original score, live musical performance, prop comedy, and absurdist theater. XyxyNyxyX is an unfolding bardic exploration of existential nonsense woven with equal measures of storybook whimsy, cosmic foolery, carefully composed nuance, and psychonautical dream theater. Like a dizzying ritual of uncanny intimacy, The THR33 of Playstructure Dreamcast create a kaleidoscope of poignant, idiotic, and surreal vignettes that serve as a romping rumination into how the frame of our belief drives us to folly, to beauty, to terror, and to tragedy as we attempt to avoid the unyielding perilousness of uncertainty.