Notes for D/deaf and hard of hearing audiences

Welcome, and thanks for joining us for K BODY AND MIND.

This miniseries is available to watch with Closed Captioning. K BODY AND MIND is also an experimental piece with some unique staging choices, so I offer these notes to you, which I hope will facilitate your enjoyment of the show.

K BODY AND MIND is set in the near future on New Silica Island, a special deregulated economic zone that allows for a vast array of technological and genetic experimentation. Our story focuses on one company, The Grove, a collective living in bioengineered and shareable bodies.

K BODY AND MIND features two performers playing two of these bodies. In turn, these bodies give voice to a variety of characters throughout the performance. You may not be able to deduce visually which character is speaking at any given time, so in our closed captioning, we have included character names to assist with this delineation. Included on the next page is a legend of the characters, including some descriptions of their traits, and the qualities with which our performers voice them.

Please feel free to reference them before watching, or pause the video to check when a new character appears. Another totally valid option is to not check the voice legend at all! A big part of the experiment of K BODY AND MIND is leaving lots of space for the audience to interpret and imagine the people, settings, and actions (much like you might in a novel). So if you would rather imagine who these characters are on your own, feel free to skip it!

I’d also like to mention that you will probably notice how sparse the staging of K BODY AND MIND is. There is a purposeful separation of the audio and visual tracks of K BODY AND MIND, to encourage the audience to actively imagine the world of the play. Whereas the visual track of K BODY AND MIND tends to be more abstract and expressive, the soundtrack (especially the dialogue) tends to carry more of the literal story. The soundtrack is heavily inspired by cyberpunk (like the brooding synthesizers of Blade Runner, or the driving synths of The Matrix), anime (the thumping marimbas and choral voices of AKIRA). There are also many instances of real-life recordings of public spaces and crowds, including recordings of parks, amusement parks, and busy public squares that were captured by sound designer Nancy Tam on a trip to tropical Hong Kong. We have attempted to convey the essence of this in our closed captioning, perhaps with a bit more detail than is typical, so we can best represent this form to you.

Thanks for joining us.

-Conor Wylie, Writer + Director

Closed Captioning provided by Claire Davie (https://clairetranslates.com/)