Jordan Rountree

Published on the occasion of the performance Chthonic Archive N° 3 , Orpheus at the Movies by Jordan Rountree.

In Orpheus at the Movies, a man goes to the movies and puts his phone on airplane mode as a pretext for ghosting his lover while she leaves voicemails for him. 

Each CHTHONIC ARCHIVE publication includes the complete text for the original performance, documentation photos, and a QR code that links to a secret page with a downloadable audio recording.

CHTHONIC ARCHIVE is an ongoing performance art project and published series. Each piece threads gestural and radio acting into music and sound scapes framed by video installations. Published works document the premieres in texts and images.

CHTHONIC ARCHIVE’s performances fuse the aural intimacy of 1930s American radio dramas with stylized visual idioms inspired by traditional Japanese Noh theater. Story material is at once personal and archaic: the artist mines mythological terrain for glimpses of himself and his unfolding world.