RESURRECTION ROOM
2014
Created for the 2014 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, RESURRECTION ROOM was Gunnar Montana’s second major production. Montana created an alternate universe where technology had the power to rebuild life.
The show followed a young woman entering a strange dimension that operated like a living science fiction video game. She moved through different levels, encountering big queer robots and mechanical demon geishas along the way. A heavy electronic soundtrack drove her journey and gave the room the energy of an underground rave. The deeper she traveled into the room, the less recognizable the world became.
At the center of the production was the idea of resurrection as reinvention. Montana was interested in the possibility of destroying an old version of yourself and becoming someone new. The idea came from his own frustration with relationships, work, and the repetition of everyday life. RESURRECTION ROOM became a way to imagine escaping all of it and starting over.
The world itself was built largely by hand. Montana melted thousands of discarded CDs individually and used them to create a reflective futuristic environment. He also spent months troubleshooting how to make the hot pink alien masks worn by the characters. The masks were handmade from latex with tubes extending from them, helping turn the performers into the strange creatures that inhabited the RESURRECTION ROOM. The process involved a lot of trial and error and became part of Montana’s growing obsession with figuring out how to physically build the worlds he imagined.
-
RESURRECTION ROOM was also the beginning of Montana taking on nearly every part of creating a production himself. He edited the music and designed and built the sets. He created the choreography and directed the performers. He produced the show and handled his own promotion. Much of it was learned by doing. If something needed to exist for the show, Montana figured out how to make it himself. This way of working would become fundamental to Gunnar Montana Productions and allowed the entire production to come from one singular vision.
The production marked an important evolution in Montana’s work. G Philly described RESURRECTION ROOM as the moment Montana was “hitting his artistic stride.” When footage was released later that year, the publication called it an “electric, at times unsettling performance” and his best work yet.
In the 2016 FringeArts feature Fringe at 20: John Schultz, Schultz remembered RESURRECTION ROOM as the first Fringe production that truly stayed with him. “I had never experienced that kind of work in Philly before. It was incredible.”
RESURRECTION ROOM was the production where Montana’s way of working truly began to take shape, building the world himself from the first idea through the final performance.
