An Experimental Vaudeville in Tiny Living. With synthesizer-heavy Weimar cabaret tunes, original music, and projection-based set design, our multimedia cabaret explores and exposes the popular trend of the micro-apartment. A new model for sustainability or crass profiteering? Is it salvation or shtick?
$20 / 60 minutes
Casual FreyDay presents Containertopia, an original production created, written, and designed by Julia Frey and Sam Day Harmet. This apartment has everything! Song. Dance. Jokes. Zoning laws. Environmental collapse. Housing crises. Existential crises. A game show. A therapy session. All this in under 250 square feet.
America has a fever for tiny living. Whether out of economic necessity or cultural zeitgeist, the micro-apartment has captured the public imagination. Is it salvation or shtick? A new model for sustainability or crass profiteering? Containertopia is a 21st-century take on vaudeville that looks at the ever-shrinking living spaces that city-dwellers submit themselves to. With synthesizer-heavy Weimar cabaret tunes, original music, and projection-based set design, our multimedia cabaret explores and exposes the popular trend of tiny living.
What afforded to us is affordable? Sam Day Harmet and Julia Frey have collaborated on a number of productions from Brooklyn College to the Brooklyn Museum, and this spring’s NY premiere of Containertopia marked the first official project of Casual FreyDay, a producing partnership that pools their respective experience in music and theater to concoct works that incorporate new media technology into live performance. Devising together as writers, designers, composers, and programmers, the pair creates every element of their multimedia performances.
Julia Frey, a Philadelphia native, has split her entire career between her hometown and New York City. She is a company member of New Paradise Laboratories with whom she created and performed The Adults, 27, Prom, and 10 Unnameable Spectacles. In Philadelphia she has performed with FringeArts, Quintessence, Luna Theater, and ComedySportz. In New York: ANT Fest/Ars Nova, Brooklyn Museum, Samuel French OOB, Mt Tremper Arts Festival, FringeNYC, Upright Citizens Brigade, Magnet Theater. For over a decade, she has performed, hosted, and taught comedy improv in both of her cities, across the country, and on a giant boat.
Sam Day Harmet is a mandolinist, composer, improvisor, and music educator based in Brooklyn, New York. A musician of diverse tastes, Sam’s projects range from klezmer, to gypsy jazz, to electro-funk, to free improvisation, to soundpainting and beyond. He has also worked on numerous theater projects, composing the scores for Letter of Marque’s Gifts at the Access Theater, Opera Nouveau’s The Tarot Show at HERE Arts Center, and music directing Molly Murphy & Neil deGrasse Tyson On Our Last Day On Earth for Ars Nova’s ANT Fest. Aside from mandolin-ing and composing, he also enjoys exploring electronics, banjos, woodwinds, and breaking the space-time continuum.