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There's no such thing as a free lunch. But, there's always room for Vox.
Just Vox it. Life's better here! Can you hear me now?

The questions:
How to love this world?
How much is enough?
How to begin to give back as much as we take?

We U.S.-ians are seduced by cold corporate capitalism in its best, warmest disguise; the dream of consumerism and convenience. The glitz of entertainment, the pursuit of pleasure, the treasure of stuff all conspires to keep us from noticing that the culture has ceased to be about anything else but our consumption. Our lifestyle is fed to us from the top down by multinational corporations. Theirs are the only voices on the airwaves, the only choices in the elections, the only energy we can buy and the only food we can consume. They enforce the menu of beauty and heroes, tactics and toys. They create a spectacle that induces a trance that allows us all to indulge and mindlessly over-consume with no responsibility accepted or expected from anyone for the emptiness at the heart of the spectacle. It's hard in these times to get any good, focused anger going, but it's very, very easy to get depressed. The side effects of progress are despair and alienation, a constant need for newness, numbness, and a real incapacity to see or feel beyond ourselves, here in Fortress America.

We live inside a ruthless and arrogant empire; restlessly and relentlessly we paw through the world, destroying cultures and species, decimating nature, craving, craving. Our craving drives wars and keeps us from imaging peace or anybody else's reality. What we call normalcy is impossibly unsustainable and morally unacceptable. What does democracy really look like, beyond the hype of "freedom," the wars against "terrorism," beyond the divisive and useful phrases, like "United We Stand" and "God Bless America" that substitute for what real freedom could be, for what real terrorism is?

What can save our souls and our culture? Not force. Not technology. Only the imagination. Essential to our survival are spontaneous acts of free minds. Only these can break the trance that ropes us down to the rusty railroad tracks. We can un-spin the knots that hold us here before the train of imminent doom smashes our freedom and our world to dust. We can escape through the redemptive power of stories we tell ourselves and each other. Images of different paths and expanded prospects, tales of right relation can save us, if we can imagine them and step into them in time. We can spin reverse spider webs that will set us free. Art is crucial to liberations.

The questions are simple: How to love this world? How much is enough? How to begin to give back as much as we take?

Vox Feminista presents a show about culture jamming. Predicated on radical theories of social change, culture jamming describes the need to interrupt the spectacle, to wake up, rise up, and get up off our asses and our knees. We offer an abbreviated map, a taste of the world to come, some suggestions for how to break free of the trance. How does culture change? Why do people want what they think they want? How can the voices of peace and sustainability get through the roar of the status quo? Culture jamming is about meme warfare.

A "meme" is a unit of information that leaps from brain to brain. It's a concept, a logo, a tune. In the US, our ruling meta-meme is that the corporate driven marketplace delivers happiness, prosperity, and freedom to all. There's been no competing mass vision since world war II. Ideology is more important than armies to maintaining empire. In this show, we create a new ideological vision that can stand against the eco-cidal, obese, post-Microsoft, internationally monopolized, genetically altered, crap saturated, globally melting, revenge soaked, nuclear, plastic, and chemical modernity.

"Pirate the Possible: The Empire Walks the Plank" lays bare the empire. The show opens with artful deconstructions of consumption. We follow up with an in-depth introduction of: The Possible. We unveil the Trance-Ending Handbook, a treasure map of how to begin to reclaim our culture and our lives. The greatest lie of empire is that there's nothing we can do to change it. Vox explores our legacy of resistance beyond the corridors of power, in a pirate consciousness where outlaws draw new designs for sustainable, satisfying, and joyful rebellions that push the empire right off the plank.

The cast is a crew of pirates, and the ship of state is in mutiny as Vox Feminista returns to our 16th year of comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comfortable. Vox's pirates check out the possibilities that dance in the vast chasm that hangs between self absorption and self awareness. We explore new ways to measure progress and success, question the inevitability of expansionist empire, and reprogram the doomsday machine. Turns out there is such a thing as a free lunch.

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cast & crew