Nat & Veronica (Nat Kusinitz and Veronica Hunsinger-Loe) are theater artists from New Orleans, and they're currently partnering with Austin's Rude Mechs to bring their show She Was Born to local audiences.
It's an unusual show, with one performer (Hunsinger-Loe plays She, an extraterrestrial creature who's somewhere between an insect and a human) and no dialogue. The audience is kept purposefully small, with only twenty or so audience members joining She inside her alien pod, which has been hand-built inside the Off Shoot art space at the Off Center. "We were thinking, 'how can get an even more intimate relationship between the audience and this character?'" Kusinitz says, "So we decided a good way to do that would be to literally put the audience inside the world of that character."
The character of She was inspired by several real-world creatures, particularly insects. "They are these aliens who live around us that we ignore the most," Hunsinger-Loe says. "But when you really zoom in on an insect life, it's...beautifully choreographed."
A particular insect that Nat & Veronica drew inspiration from is the puriri moth, which they discovered while in New Zealand recently. "The puriri moth has a seven year gestation period, and then it lives for two days," Kusinitz says. This short-lived moth inspired them to create a show that would chronicle, in just one hour, an entire lifecycle.
See 'She Was Born' at the Off Center's Off Shoot through September 26.
