Amor & Psyche
Saturday May 16 | doors at 7:30pm | performance at 8:00pm
$20 ADVANCE tickets | $25 DAY OF SHOW | $10 STUDENT tickets with ID | always pay what you can
Amor & Psyche is an immersive sound and performance installation by dama in collaboration with Amy Zimmitti, that reimagines the ancient myth of Psyche and Eros
Drawing from the mythological narratives of empire and the intimacy of personal memory, the work becomes a sensorial excavation of how love, power, and resistance shape both the individual the collective body. Amor & Psyche asks what it means to love fiercely, vulnerably in a world structured by monumental power.
The performance is staged within an installation of an infinity-shaped labyrinth, a continuous figure that folds time and myth back onto themselves. This spatial loop becomes a site where political and ancestral narratives converge. We present architectural references: the Capitol dome as contemporary Pantheon, the White House as a palace-temple, the ruins of Rome as both blueprint and echo. Appearing through projected fragments, light, costume, and sonic vibration. These monumental forms, typically associated with governance, order, and control, dissolve into dream-images. Within the labyrinth, they become unstable symbols, exposing their mythic foundations and their susceptibility to reinterpretation. The labyrinth functions simultaneously as stage and memory chamber, where Psyche’s journey becomes collective and a descent into unknowing, a negotiation with the unseen, and a reclamation of desire as a form of knowledge.
The soundscape, composed and performed by dama and Amy Zimmitti, moves between primal resonance and contemporary sonic experimentation. Field recordings, breath, body percussion, handmade instruments, voice, strings, and electronic processing form an evolving sensorial score. Sound spirals through the space in looping cycles, at times intimate, at times monumental and mirroring Psyche’s oscillation between fear and wonder, tenderness and power. Drone textures expand and contract like a lung; fragmented speech and spoken word unfold ritualistically. The work is not narrative but experiential. Rather than retelling the myth, it invites the body to encounter myth not as story but as condition, and an atmosphere through which the audience moves. The installation becomes a mythological agora, collapsing boundaries between empire and eros, governance and dream, past and present. Within this, the audience is invited into a state of porousness: to listen with the skin, to inhabit the instability of archetypes, and to follow sound into the uncertainties where transformation begins.
dama
dama is a Brazilian transdisciplinary artist, researcher, and curator whose work draws on mythological, historical, and esoteric sources to challenge dominant narratives and reframe women’s roles within cultural memory. Her ongoing curatorial and research project, the Surrealist Study Group, is hosted at the Philosophical Research Society (PRS) in Los Angeles, a historic center for metaphysical inquiry. Through this platform, she develops an experimental feminist and queer curatorial practice rooted in surrealist methodologies. Through artistic collaboration, Dama examines how knowledge is preserved, transmitted, and reimagined at the intersection of the subconscious, the symbolic, and the scholarly.
Amy Zimmitti
Amy Zimmitti is an artist and sound engineer living and working in Los Angeles. In 2008, Amy relocated from the East Coast to become a course director for The Los Angeles Film School. She develops instructional content for several degree programs and mentors students in the sound production of their filmmaking, animation, and game development projects.