Crafting Performances for an Audience of One: Abraham Burickson, Co-Founder + Artistic Director, Odyssey Works

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Abraham Burickson Episode 3 Show Notes
Our conversation was taped on May 29, 2020.

In this episode, I speak Abraham Burickson the co-founder and artistic director of Odyssey Works. An organization that designs immersive experiences for an audience of one that’s interdisciplinary, and poised on the boundary between art and life.

In our conversation, we discuss the challenges of crafting and executing Odysseys, the power of performance art, and the future of individualized immersive experiences in the age of zoom.

Trained as an architect of buildings, Abraham translates his experience into being an architect of experiences. He discusses his time working with the Whirling Dervishes in New York and Turkey, Odysseys past and present, and their transcendental effects on the participant.
About Abraham:

Abraham Burickson is the co-founder and Artistic Director of Odyssey Works, an interdisciplinary performance group that makes bespoke performances for one-person audiences. Trained in architecture at Cornell University, Burickson’s work spans writing, design, performance, and sound art. For more than a decade with Odyssey Works, he has continually sought to push the boundaries of interdisciplinarity and participatory art, working in collaboration with poets, actors, sound artists, composers, psychologists, designers, architects, filmmakers, and more in an attempt to develop an artistic process that is as rigorous in its craft as it is devoted to the continual re-evaluation of traditional form. Since 2002, the group has produced work in New York, San Francisco, Austin, Ithaca, and Seattle. In 2009 he started the Odyssey Lab, a series of intensive interdisciplinary retreats devoted to the study of basic questions in art. He is the winner of the 2018 Mary Sawyers Baker Prize, and his work has been profiled in the New York Times, Vulture, FastCompany, KALW, ArtInfo, the Stanford Storytelling Project, the SF Bay Guardian, SF Weekly, ARTE television, Metro NY, The Alcalde, and elsewhere. He has lectured at such places as the Brooklyn Museum, Cornell University, Fordham University, The GoGame, and Southern Exposure Gallery. In 2010, Charlie, a collection of his poems, was published on Codhill Press. His book, co-written with Ayden LeRoux, Odyssey Works:Transformative Experiences for an Audience of One, was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2016.

About Odyssey Works:

Imagine waking up to find yourself immersed in a performance that is all about you. Since 2001, Odyssey Works has been creating immersive, durational experiences for an audience of one. Our team is made up of artists in dozens of disciplines who study the life of one individual and use whatever means necessary to create intimate, meaningful performances that last days, weeks, or months, and occur not on a stage but interwoven with the life of our audience of one. The experiences are transformative; most of our participants change jobs, move, make new commitments to loved ones shortly after their Odysseys.

Odyssey Works Website: http://www.odysseyworks.org/

Odyssey Works: Transformative Experiences for an Audience of One publication page: http://www.odysseyworks.org/publications

Music credit: Maurice Ravel's String Quartet in F major - II. Assez vif, très rythmé produced by the Isabella Stuart Gardener Museum (issued under a Creative Commons License).