EMMA BERGMAN

Recent Projects

Placement Screening
If It’s Not A Dream
[    ] Protection
Rocko
Say You’re Sorry
Visitation
Forgivability Scale
 Too Day


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@em_bergman



Say You’re Sorry (2023)performance, live projection
1 hour

with Elif Cadoux, Sophie Goldberg, and Mia Massimino
original music by Douglas Hertz
voiceover by Nick Byron

developed at Centro NAVE (Santiago, Chile), Perfect Storm (Cotacachi, Ecuador), Brunakra Temporary (Simrismhamn, Sweden), Gylleboverket (Gärsnäs, Sweden), Life World (Brooklyn, NY)


Say You’re Sorry is an original play about grief, technology, and efforts to forgive. Four performers on two stages—one live projected behind the other—and the voice of an omniscient Rulemaker confront the perils of systematizing emotion.

One stage features the Protagionist and Dead Dad, a father and child reunited under ambiguous circumstances as the Protagionist troubleshoots a forgiveness tool. The other stage presents samples of day-to-day life, audio interviews and dramatized scenes that reveal complications in attempts to forgive. After each sample, the Rulemaker announces a rule that has been broken and its replacement rule. The performers let the air out of inflatable set pieces, slowly transforming the stage into a graveyard of deflated forms.

Click here to view the digital program.

Say You’re Sorry was created over five years of participatory performance research. The initial projects—Forgivability Scale, Shadowboxing, Hard Feelings: A Show About Grudges, Truce, and Forgive Or Forget—led first to a digital workbook in 2020 and then to the culminating work in 2023.