forever for now
Premiered May 2022
New York Live Arts
Direction: Hannah Cullen
Performed and created by Liam Mackenzie, Mieke Matteson, Nyah Raposo, Pilot Roberts, Beatrice White
Lighting design: Christopher Thielking
Costumes and set: Victor Jeffreys II
Original composition and sound design: Hannah Cullen and Ian Noel
Production Management: Zaire Baptiste
Photos: Danica Paulos
forever for now is a work about love, a phenomenon that none of us fully understand. We grew up watching stories where people fell for their soulmate, overcame insurmountable differences, and lived happily ever after – permanently fixed, in love. In practice, it feels much harder to place your finger on the one “thing” we’re apparently all here to find. And when there are so many kinds of love, so many shapes and shades and different people for that one-true-emotion to land on, how do we know when we’ve got “it?” Why one word for something so complex? Why just one story for an experience that we’ll inevitably practice over and over with lovers, friends, parents, children, strangers, fellow humans, ourselves? For all the ways we’re confounded by love, there’s one thing we know to be true: in the unpredictability of life, nothing is permanent. And whether our love changes in the morning, for right now, it’s everything.