Amaya Zhané
Obsidian
Obsidian is a play about Ouai, a city dweller living in a 400 sq ft studio apartment, and their conversations with an AI language model. They talk of consciousness, power, will, sentience, and the meaning of life. This piece yearns to find humanity in our surveillant and technology-dependent reality.
Obsidian yearns to find humanity in our surveillant and technology-dependent reality. It begs us to question if our relationships with the internet are some of our closest and most dear.
Amaya Zhané (she/her) is a Florida-born, Seattle-based director and mixed-media artist. As a recent graduate of Cornish College of the Arts’ Original Works Program for playwrights and directors, she has directed Desdemona’s Child (blood cry) at Cornish Playhouse, assistant directed Seattle Rep’s Fat Ham, and directed/produced the new work PHAT. One of Amaya’s goals in writing and producing work with black characters is to not exclusively focus on black trauma. She wants to see investigative and unfiltered realism based on black experiences in everyday life. This includes black joy! Physically, she is very interested in elemental work through choreography and gestural movement. She is particularly interested in repetition and excessive duration, as well as substituting props and set dressing with object-specific sound design and pantomime. Technically, she explores digital life through projection mapping, as well as the integration of live sound mixing and recorded sound with theater performance.
She finds New Age and non-traditional methods of live performance incredibly generative in her creative practice. Amaya is an emerging director, so her large-scale goals are still green and malleable. However, something she is always moving towards in the micro, is specificity and authenticity in her work. Collaboration is one of her favorite parts of the directing/producing process.
