craig quintero upcoming/recent projects February 29-March 17, 2024
Over the Rainbow (VR 360 Experience)
Luxembourg City Film Festival
February 29-March 17, 2024

It is human nature too long for something more or different than what one has. At times, this aspirational dreaming can lead to advancements: someone finds a better career, leaves an abusive relationship, or, as is the case for Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, returns home. But more often than not, this attitude leads to a sense of discontent with one’s own lot, an unquenchable desire for something new. "Over the Rainbow" explores this precarious balance between desire and satisfaction, encouraging an honest reflection on our own personal sense of identity and values. What are we searching for? Where do we call home? Are we happy? This VR experience takes the audience on a surreal journey from a theatre audition to a dark, David Lynch-inspired dreamscape to a Broadway-style musical. But "Over the Rainbow" offers more than a physical voyage; it is a trip within, an entering into of our aspirations, insecurities, and joys. The project premiered at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival and was shown as part of the "Best of" section at the 2023 Venice International Film Festival.
craig quintero upcoming/recent projects April 25-27, 2024
taking it down and putting it up
Coronet Theatre (London)
April 25-27, 2024

Riverbed Theatre’s brand new piece taking it down and putting it up is a poetic meditation on the work of Marcel Duchamp, the acts of construction and deconstruction, and the hereness of the present moment.

In a 1987 interview, John Cage discussed the room-size installation Marcel Duchamp had secretly spent twenty years assembling in his New York studio from 1946-1966, Étant donnés. Instead of focusing on the evocative imagery of Duchamp’s surreal installation, Cage emphasized the book-length instruction manual Duchamp prepared for workers that detailed the proper way to dismantle and reassemble the installation: the unscrewing of wall boards, rolling up of canvases, the wrapping of objects, etc. (and then the sequential order for putting it all back together again). Duchamp prepared the manual to serve a specific pragmatic function, but Cage was interested in its esoteric by product, the unintentional “musicality” of the dismantling and re-construction process. By focusing on the sounds produced by the workers as they followed the instructions, Cage invited us to consider the manual as a musical score, to stop and take note of the music of everyday life.

Although we do not follow an instruction manual, our lives are also filled with the inevitable process of taking things down and putting them back up (relationships, businesses, dreams…). We are so familiar with this routine of beginnings and endings that we lose sight of the moment in between, this moment, today.