How do you get your audience to touch the art? Artist Abigail DeVille constructs the set for a premiere performance of Adrienne Kennedy’s play She Talks to Beethoven (1989) at the JACK arts center in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Theater director Charlotte Brathwaite describes the play’s dreamlike style and time-bending narrative: an American expatriate in 1960’s Ghana “converses” with Beethoven in early 1800s Vienna. DeVille draws parallels between the play’s temporal cross-cutting and theoretical physics—specifically the concept of wormholes, or passageways in the space-time continuum—as well as the hidden histories and absences that mark the African American experience.

To create the sculptural set titled Intersection (2014), DeVille and Brathwaite drill holes into wooden flats, linking them together to form two concentric ellipses. Acquiring cast-off materials through the Recycled Artist in Residency program in Philadelphia, DeVille describes what attracts her to the discarded: “Material already has so much information trapped inside of it. It has whatever it’s chemically made up of, its physical and chemical properties, whoever owned it, loved it, and threw it away…What can you improve on that?” In a performance set to Beethoven’s Fidelio, the actors move fluidly through the dramatically lit set, sharing the sculptural space with an equally mobile audience. “You can hold an audience captive,” marvels DeVille, who is fascinated by the possibilities a theatrical context can provide. The film also documents DeVille at work in a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem.