3 Questions

with Ashira Tova Montaño

Threshold Art Collective is New Mexico's newest group of boundary-testing thespians. Their multimedia play #dyingtotextgary, running this week at Madrid's Engine House Theatre, utilizes original writing, songs and real-life responses from the World Wide Web. Ashira Tova Montaño is one of the play's co-authors and stars.

Who are Threshold Art Collective, and how are you involved?
Threshold Art Collective is the thought-child of Sheridan Johnson. It's her dream and something she's been working on for a while now. She and Brennan Foster co-founded it, and those of us working with them are seeing it through its baby steps. We're a very young, rebellious little crew trying to change the way theater is done in New Mexico. Theater can get a little stagnant, and we'd like to revive it with some modern twists. Currently, I'm writing, acting, and occasionally I do some stage-managing.

#dyingtotextgary explores modern technology as well as how humans relate to it and to each other. How do you present these questions?
It's partially crowd-sourced, and parts of it are based in things like Tinder, Instagram and OKCupid. I had a lot of submissions from friends as well. The concept is looking at the way communication between people has changed and how that's altered the way we perceive romance and love. We're picking out threads in all these people with different backgrounds who have had similar stories of an inability to escape. We no longer really have the end of relationships that we used to, and we're examining the ways technology has helped that happen.

How do you see technology evolving, and what do you think the implications will be for human relations?
It's so hard to predict where technology might take us. It does seem that the most important things to us in regard to technology are still mating, romance, love and cats. Maybe at some point we'll have holograms of cats being sent to us from our ex-lovers.

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