DEATH RATTLE is a live performance based on the play The Empire Builders, written by the French existentialist playwright and jazz musician Boris Vian. The original story follows a family, trapped indoors by a noise, and portrays their ensuing anguish and destruction. This new piece tears that script apart and reassembles it with dialogue and text fabricated from local internet chatter – conversations, images, and video found on Nextdoor, Facebook, and Reddit – created by our Carlisle community.

This piece explores isolation and community, as well as how we treat each other and ourselves.

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The internet is always there.

Wherever you go, things look the same.

Repeated.

Wherever you go, things look the same.

Wherever you go,

repeated.

Happy families are all alike,

Now unhappy families are too;

progress.

Repeated.

DEATH RATTLE employs an array of new and used technology and forms, a patchwork of sculpture and media, original live sound scores and compositions, and a contemporary punk poetic aesthetic informed by our local (counter)culture here in central Pennsylvania.

For ages 18+

Content Considerations

This performance contains brief suggested nudity, brief graphic language, and frequent suggested violence.

About the Artist

Valley Traction: We are a group of people who live and create performances in the Cumberland Valley of Pennsylvania. Our work incorporates the people, materials, and methods that directly surround us. We collect, assemble, and then share. We value both the physical and the digital, and believe that they can be explored concurrently. Our work is temporary – acknowledging that nothing is permanent. We push against meaning, and that leads us to prioritize experience over understanding. To us, realism – is not necessary. Our work embraces the power of obscurity, absurdity, argument, humor, and re-imagined media.