Lars Jan ’00 will return to his alma mater Jan. 29–Feb. 2 for a residency and performances of The Institute of Memory (TIMe) , a production by his innovative Los Angeles performance group, Early Morning Opera. A combination of autobiography, investigative journalism, and detective story, The Institute of Memory confronts the contemporary American audience with urgent questions about the larger spiritual and philosophical consequences of political terror, trauma, and privacy in the digital age and the temptation of simply ignoring them.

Jan’s residency and performances of TIMe are sponsored by the William J. Cooper Foundation.

Jan will host two performance workshops—on Tuesday, Jan. 29, from 4:30 to 6 p.m., and Saturday, Feb. 2, from 1 to 4 p.m.—at the Lang Performing Arts Center’s Frear Ensemble Theater. In addition, he will host a lecture, “Embodying the Future: Contemporary Interdisciplinary Performance,” on Wednesday, Jan. 30, at 4:30 p.m. at the Lang Performing Arts Center’s Cinema.

Performances of The Institute of Memory (TIMe) will be held on Friday, Feb. 1, at 5 p.m., and Saturday, Feb. 2, at 7 p.m. in the Lang Performing Arts Center. A post-show discussion, “Memory and Vision: History, Performance and Social Change,” with Stephen Lang Professor of the Performing Arts Allen Kuharski will follow the Saturday performance.

A director, visual artist, writer, and founding member of Early Morning Opera, Jan was the winner of the third Audemars Piguet Art Commission, for which he exhibited Slow-Moving Luminaries at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2017. He is a past MacDowell and Princeton Atelier fellow, a former artist-in-residence at the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, and a 2016 recipient of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 100 Award.

Along with the Cooper Foundation, the events are sponsored by Swarthmore’s Department of Theater and co-sponsored by the Departments of English Literature, Film & Media Studies, Music & Dance, Modern Languages and Literatures (Russian Section), History, and the Peace & Conflict Studies Program. Originally commissioned by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute/Culture.pl (Warsaw), TIMe is supported by Culture.pl as part of a program celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Polish theater director Tadeusz Kantor.