Lilith Performance Studio posted a slide show of our recent forest performance collaboration, Undead in the Night on their website. Check it out; crank the volume!

The full article from SVT, Zombievandring i mörkret is online! The TV spot features my ever-frightening vampiric and zombified friends Märta and Clara (V’s), Tom and Amanda (Z’s). Notice Tom’s vacant hungry stare, you wouldn’t want to meet him alone in the dark forest…

In case you thought this performance wouldn’t be scary…here are just two photos featuring vampire Emma and victims Mathias and Mikael, all non-professional and amazing actors. (Photos by Petter Pettersson…press quality available at Lilith’s website).

…we’ll see you in the forest after dark…
Jillian

A view on the way to the forest near Malmö…I’m definitely not in Kansas anymore.

My friend Christine Sciulli wrote to me today in response to an announcement about my upcoming performance, Undead in the Night. “God you’ve come a long way from our Blair Witch screening!!!”, she wrote. In 1999 Christine called me at my part time job with an invitation to a late night movie. I happily said yes, but apparently was the only person on the planet who hadn’t heard about the film, a little out of touch with popular culture at the time. I sat through the horror film in utter terror, balled up in my seat, peering through clenched fingers as the awful ending pierced the heart of my worst fears. I made her stay on the phone with me that night and couldn’t sleep for days. Camping was out of the question for ages.

A decade later - really?? - I’ve seen countless horror films and now intentionally put myself in a forest (a long long way from home, no less) creating a living horror film. Last night we were out in the woods performing some lighting tests and my eyes and breath were not at ease. For a city girl the darkened woods holds countless unseen threats, real and imagined.

The performance is coming together, our cast is almost complete, and every one of them is absolutely perfect.

If you find yourself in Malmö, Sweden in late May, please plan to attend Undead in the Night, a performance with Lilith Performance Studio!

Undead in the Night dares you to enter the forest for a walk in the dark. Be very very quiet, you are not alone.

Zombies and Vampires are radically different yet universally recognizable archetypes of horror film monsters who rarely if ever appear together. They share the evil power to turn victims into monsters, and caught in the unknowable position between “alive” and “dead” they have the power to fascinate and terrorize. Placing them together in this performance, I violate the codes and boundaries of horror genre and create an impossible scenario.

Zombies moan as they stagger stiffly and unconsciously in packs towards their single goal – to catch and consume the flesh of the living. Gruesome and rotting, they are ordinary people reincarnated as characterless and soulless ghouls. Although they are brutish, vile, and almost unstoppable, they are neither resourceful nor clever, and are imminently expendable.

Vampires slink and pose with agility as they move towards the forest’s edge. Aristocratic, powerful, seductive, exotic, elegant, timeless, and mysterious, they have a rich immortal life and feed off human blood. Victims sometimes beg to be “turned” into these exotic and fascinating creatures.

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…If you want to be in the performance, see details here.

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MALMö, Sweden
Calling all prospective Zombies and Vampires for a performance deep in a Swedish forest, after nightfall.

Zombies vs Vampires (working title) is an artwork where groups of the two “undead” monster archetypes – local people as actors – enact horror film scenes in the woods at night. Audience members make their way along the path in complete darkness. Interested actors need not be professional but must be comfortable in the woods and the dark, serious, and available for auditions, rehearsals, and the performance (all in May).

In popular film lore Zombies and Vampires have their own iconographies and characterizations. Rotting zombies moan as they stagger slowly, clumsily, and unconsciously. They don’t sneak and they travel in groups. They have only one goal – to catch and consume the flesh of the living. Despite being terrifying, they are neither resourceful nor clever and are imminently expendable.

The elegant vampires slink and pose with agility as they move. Catlike, they are very flexible and thirsty. Perceived to be sexy, beautiful, exotic, and mysterious, they have a rich and immortal life and feed off human blood.

Both archetypes bite their living prey and the two rarely if ever appear together in films.

Auditions begin May 6th and the performance will take place in late May. Contact Jonna Ölund jonna [at] lilithperformancestudio [dot] com for more info!

Last week I had a planning session with the fabulous Lilith Performance Studio for an upcoming forest performance in Malmö, Sweden. After 3 days and nights amidst the dark blueish pines, swamps, and mossy hills I am having trouble adjusting to New York’s nakedness. Thinking of doing some guerrilla planting, if the spring ever comes: it snowed yesterday, briefly.

On the plane I was unable to resist viewing the almost unwatchable and aforementioned Twilight. No doubt the tiny airplane screen did not do the sweeping Pacific Northwest forest scenes justice, and I confess I am no screaming teenage fan, but for the life of me this story of forbidden love among the vampires screams of cliché.

The “nice” vampires including our perpetually pouting hero happily inhabit, for the moment, a posh glass house sans coffins in rural Washington State, where avoiding full sunlight is unnecessary (since most days are grey and since the sunlight doesn’t kill them anyway), vampire dad dons the guise of preppy local doctor, and everyone is terribly attractive if well beyond the pale…

According to IMDB, “A teenage girl risks everything when she falls in love with a vampire” not the least of which is any hope of being independent. She goes willingly into the role of princess in utter distress and the movie ends with Bella, our damsel, doomed to be protected by her “hero” forever. Only he, and his extended family, can save her from the vampire bad guy and his own monstrous desires. Now that’s progress.

On the plus side, for the first time ever I enjoyed watching baseball played on screen, since vampiric forces make anything more exciting.

I Love Sarah Jane, on the other hand, is an Australian micro film about lust in the time of zombies. As you may know, zombies are at the other side of the class scale. We find Zombie dad in this case tied up in a wrecked suburban backyard, snarling at a skinny shirtless teenage boy who taunts him.

Sarah Jane herself is no ingénue. She emerges from a dark and claustrophobic living room to put the lusting teenage Jimbo - the subject of the film’s title, a mess of bullies, and her eventually (spoiler alert!) chain-sawed dad out of their misery by the end of the film … some with a heavy shovel, sealing her position as no-nonsense heroine and the far from innocent love interest extraordinaire, with a sense of very dark humour.

Last night I was with my sister Jennifer in the back of a huge moving truck, sifting through boxes. We came across a long thin jar of coffee and I asked if she’d seen the film, a Disney movie about coffee - I said, “it’s not the usual Disney-pretty story, considering the conditions on coffee plantations.”

Jennifer said no, but she wanted to see it. We started to unwrap it from its jar and then she pulled out a long flat box full of sugar cubes. We sat with the film on our lap while she held the sugar box for us to snack from. I saw something lying across the cubes that looked like a mouse dropping - then it moved. It was a worm or caterpillar, and very fast. I swatted it away - then another one - suddenly the box seemed alive with them under the white cubes. I said “Jenn careful, very careful, move that box away and throw it as far as you can”. She didn’t hear me or was too slow and the air or scene around us went quivery as though there was a layer of worms beneath the surface and the sky exploded with dark red flying worms. Worming in my face, eyes, ears, mouth.

Finally I woke up, hot in my bed.

*image from Princeton’s Genomic labs - check out their wonderful worm research movies.

In Saskatoon at the moment it is minus twenty-seven degrees Celcius, a temperature that deserves more than a tiny number in order that you can savour it, contemplate it, or at least try to fathom it. Luckily we humans have very little capacity for recalling pain which is why, in the words of my undergraduate art school professor Sharon Alward, people can live in extremely cold places like Winnipeg or Saskatoon year after year without going insane*. While minus twenty-seven degrees Celcius is reason enough to evoke screams in many people, it scares neither me nor Jo-Anne Balcaen - my billboard project collaborator and friend from Montréal. Jo-Anne and I were actually born within hours of one another and grew up separately in Winnipeg**, but that aside is another story of which I will spare you the details. The daunting temperature also doesn’t scare David LaRiviere, director of Paved Arts who facilitated and helped tremendously to oversee our two-person show.

Scream opens January 16th - come see it if you dare. There will be screaming. You have been warned. The billboard is silent but it requires 3-D glasses - available at the gallery.

From the press release, “Scream is a two-person video installation and collaborative billboard presentation. While Jo-Anne Balcaen studies the scream from the perspective of ecstasy, Jillian Mcdonald approaches the same subject as a device in horror films. The exhibition project arises from the affinity that the artists recognize in each other’s work, and is thus culminated from an ongoing, long-distance creative dialog.

Jillian Mcdonald’s video work entitled The Screaming challenges the horror movie genre’s damsel in distress by inverting the power dynamics and charging the scream with a potency that overcomes any would-be menace…. Jo-Anne Balcaen’s Screaming Girls appropriates famous film images of teen-aged girls enraptured by rock ‘n’ roll performance. Stripped of sound, Balcaen’s subtle manipulation of this familiar pop adulation becomes a study of mass hysteria, oddly foreign to any kind of rationale that Beatlemania may have once produced.”

*Keep in mind these are select few people, you may not want to attempt this yourself.

**According to Wikipedia, the lowest temperature ever recorded in Winnipeg was −47.8 °C (−54.0 °F), on December 24, 1879. The coldest wind chill reading ever recorded was −57.1 °C (−70.8 °F), on February 1, 1996. I was not alive in 1879, but I’ll point out that the last winter I lived in Winnipeg was 1996.