Life Lines

LifeLines: Blavatsky Freud Experience is a post-dramatic, intermedial dance theatre performance that explores cosmic forces, the right of the mother and the child to choose life or death, and society’s responsibility in a time of global humanitarian crisis.

LifeLines: Blavatsky Freud Experience combines drama, ritual, dance, and audiovisual technologies to explore creation in the Age of Cultural Intelligence Agencies. In a stalled Nativity scene, a pair of time travelers — spiritualist Madame Blavatsky and psychologist Sigmund Freud — offer therapeutic theosophical and psychoanalytic origin stories. Their narratives are interrupted by a war-torn and confused mother-to-be who draws them out of their esoteric dreamscapes — from the depths of her vaginal canal and across dimensions — in order to liberate the Mother of the New Age and the Father of Psychoanalysis.

Original music rooted in American jazz and Balkan musical traditions, accompanied by live violin, clashes with dubious AI-generated digital archives and the intensely spasmodic grammar of ritual dance, which ultimately and blissfully transcends humanity’s self-destructive despair at this moment of global crisis.

The idea behind the performance is to bring together and harmonize in dialogue raw humanity (birthing and dance), the human impulse to generate knowledge as a way of reducing trauma and explaining mystery, debates surrounding reproductive rights, and old and new technologies (from acoustic music to AI-generated digital content), in order to issue a call to all of us to become more conscious and compassionate before it is too late.

About the Authors
LifeLines: Blavatsky Freud Experience was created by Jon McKenzie, Bryan Reynolds, and Saviana Stănescu.

Jon McKenzie (co-author, dramaturg, and video designer of LifeLines: Blavatsky Freud Experience) is a researcher, designer, and artist. He is Director of StudioLab, a critical design lab at Cornell University that connects researchers, designers, and organizations working in education, healthcare, the environment, and human rights. His books include Transmedia Knowledge for Liberal Arts and Community Engagement: A StudioLab Manifesto (2019) and Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (2026; first published in 2001).

Bryan Reynolds (co-author, director, and performer of LifeLines: Blavatsky Freud Experience) is Distinguished Professor, Chancellor’s Professor, and Claire Trevor Professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine, as well as Artistic Director of the Amsterdam-based Transversal Theater Company. Reynolds is the author or editor of more than a dozen books addressing subjects ranging from experimental theatre to performance activism around the world. His most recent book is Art Beyond the Edge: Creativity and Conflict in a World on Fire (2026). As a playwright, his plays and musicals have been produced at more than 85 venues in 25 countries across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

Saviana Stănescu (co-author of LifeLines: Blavatsky Freud Experience) is an award-winning Romanian playwright, poet, and ARTivist, and one of the most radical and innovative voices to have emerged in Eastern Europe following the fall of the Iron Curtain. Her work has been widely presented internationally and throughout the United States.

After taking part in the street protests during the Romanian Revolution against Ceaușescu’s dictatorship, Saviana worked in the newly established free press as a cultural journalist for the daily newspaper Adevărul, as a contributor to Radio Free Europe, and as a television talk-show host for TVR International. Since August 2001, Saviana Stănescu has been based in New York. She writes in both English and Romanian.

About the Director
Bryan Reynolds (co-author, director, and performer of LifeLines: Blavatsky Freud Experience) is Distinguished Professor, Chancellor’s Professor, and Claire Trevor Professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine, as well as Artistic Director of the Amsterdam-based Transversal Theater Company.

Reynolds is the author or editor of more than a dozen books addressing subjects ranging from experimental theatre to performance activism around the world. His most recent book is Art Beyond the Edge: Creativity and Conflict in a World on Fire (2026). As a playwright, his plays and musicals have been produced at more than 85 venues in 25 countries across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

Credits
Written by: Jon McKenzie, Bryan Reynolds, and Saviana Stănescu

Directed by: Bryan Reynolds

Dramaturgy: Jon McKenzie

Choreography: Kayla Emerson

Performers: Kayla Emerson, Gosia Lorenz, Bryan Reynolds, Emilia Simeonov

Music — composition and production: Vinnie Olivieri

Prefatory video — concept and creation: Jon McKenzie, Merle DeWitt III, Xiaonan Chen, Junyuan Xiong

Lighting design: Lonnie Alcaraz

Production management: Sammie Dasia Moore

The performance is a production of Transversal Theater Company

United States of America / The Netherlands