GRINDHOUSE

Late at night, one house stands out from the others: its glowing door taunting you – like an enormous chewing mouth. “Come inside,” it jeers – and you do. This is GRINDHOUSE, an original site-specific theatre piece produced for the 2024 Fertile Ground Festival by the creative minds of Basement Stair Collective, Rachel Lindsey Routh, Kora Link, Becca Wirta, and Claire Elizabeth Aldridge – with projection and video design by Clifton Holznagel and props design by Gwyneth Bushman.. Tonight, within the bowels of a living monster home, societal archetypes are on the menu. Once inside you meet the residents of the belly of the beast: a doll-like family, trapped in a stomach-churning clockwork cycle of desperation marked by the ticking away of a measured soundscape building to a boiling point. Using a design forward process, heightened repetition, and grotesque movement at a dinner party setting, GRINDHOUSE exposes that the environment we live in may be consuming us while asking the question: Could we survive outside of it?