ANTENNA DEBUNKS
MILLENNIUM FEVER WITH

WHERE: Ocean Beach, San Francisco; entrance to performance at the first steps South of the Cliff House.

TICKETS: Free

CALL: (415) 332-9454

ANTENNA, the award-winning band of performance provocateurs, takes on the Millennium with a new one-night only performance sculpture,

The event will take place on Saturday, October 17, 1998 at Ocean Beach from 2:00 to 6:00pm. The audio journey lasts approximately 35 minutes. Admission is free.

questions the significance of a 2,000 year mark when, in face, the universe is 15 billion years old. ANTENNA artists will rake and sculpt the shoreline of Ocean Beach into a visually arresting timeline, much like a Zen Garden, representing all of time from the Big Bang forward. Seen in this graphic configuration, the history of the universe consumes five football fields of shoreline, whereas the past 2,000 years consumes only 1/2000th of an inch. What then is the Big Deal?

will send audience members in ANTENNA's trademark headsets through a moonlit sand sculpture as they listen to a complex soundscape of music, voices, and sound effects tracing the universe's history. Commentary by scientists such as Timothy Ferris, author of The Whole Shebang, will be interspersed with man-on-the-street interviews, apocalyptic prophecies, high school students working through their bafflement over the B.C. timeline, and other millennial confusion.

not only debunks Millennium Fever, it calls into question the calendar that created it in the first place. The event kicks off ANTENNA's efforts to throw out the existing calendar and introduce a brand new system of counting time for the next century (and beyond). ANTENNA proposes a scientifically-based system, MegaTime, which moves to zero point of the calendar from the approximate date of Christ's birth back to the birth of the universe, or the Big Bang, approximately 15 billion years ago. After all, that is the time when Time began. Using a MegaTime system, all dates move in a forward progression, instead of the clumsy and confusing B.C./A.D. calendar currently in use. Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard scientist and author of the recently published book Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist's Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown supports the proposed MegaTime concept, saying, "I like the idea very much."

ANTENNA, known for its invention of walkmanology theater productions, was founded in 1980 by Artistic Director Chris Hardman, and has been producing site-specific events and spectacles around the Bay Area for 18 years. ANTENNA's use of electronic media, oversized masks, puppets, sculptures and interview-driven sound designs have garnered the company six Bay Area Critic Circle awards, residencies at the Smithsonian Institution's Experimental Gallery, the Spoleto USA Festival, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Performing Garage in New York, the MIT Media Lab, and a spot as one of six theater companies invited to perform at the 1984 Olympics Art Festival. Internationally, ANTENNA has toured to France, Germany and the Netherlands, and, in 1985, was one of three American groups to perform at the Cervantino Festival in Mexico.