Emily Mast, PLAY: A Play
World Premiere
With Hugo Armstrong, Gregory Barnett, Chu-Hsuan Chang, Jessica Emmanuel, Jessica Hemingway, Aramazd Stepanian, and Maxwell Transue 
Friday, October 23, 2026 at 7:30pm
Saturday, October 24, 2026 at 7:30pm
Sunday, October 25, 2026 at 4:30pm
Tickets: $12 ($10 MOCA Members)
Location: WAREHOUSE at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA

PLAY: A Play is a conceptual performance structured to playfully expose the contradictions of freedom and authority, individuality and interdependence, control and surrender. Six Players, under the watchful eye of a Coach and a relentlessly ticking clock, navigate an evolving set of rules–some absurd, others surprisingly familiar–that interrogate the invisible systems that govern power, behavior, and care. 

PLAY is not scripted; the work emerges from the Players' instincts, negotiations, failures, and discoveries in real time, making every performance distinct and porous. Designed to be rebuilt wherever it lands, PLAY adapts its set, sound, lighting, and cast to local contexts, transforming into a living, ever-evolving system rather than a fixed work. 

Functioning as both a performance rooted in the present and a rehearsal for the future, PLAY cultivates attention, trust, and collective imagination. It asks what is possible when people act together and proposes collaboration and improvisation as a radical, embodied experiment in how we might live together differently. When in doubt, play.

Cast & Production Credits:
Conception: Emily Mast
Initially devised with: Gregory Barnett, Jessica Emmanuel, Terrence Luke Johnson, Andrew Lush, and Aramazd Stepanian
The Players: Hugo Armstrong, Gregory Barnett, Jessica Emmanuel, and Jessica Hemingway
The Coach: Emily Mast
The Composer: Maxwell Transue
The Illuminator: Chu-Hsuan Chang
The Mascot: Aramazd Stepanian
Costumes, Sets & Props: Allison Honeycut, Emily Mast, and Jill Spector
Graphic design: Luiza Dale

Emily Mast (b.1976, Akron, OH) makes improvisational ecosystems for embodied inquiry that are part installation, part social experiment, part playground, and part ritual. Moving between visual art, theater, and dance, she builds participatory frameworks that prioritize process over product, responsiveness over spectacle, and curiosity over control. 

Her works are designed to evolve. Each project is a living organism that grows and morphs through repetition, reinterpretation, and shifting contexts. When restaged, new casts and settings keep rewriting the work, turning repetition itself into a kind of mutation.

Mast’s practice asks how art can map new social topographies: spaces that can stretch, collide, and fold with the weight of risk, humor, empathy, and conflict. 

Mast has staged “choreographed exhibitions” and presented live performances at the Antwerp Central Train Station; Brakke Grond, Amsterdam; M Museum, Leuven, Belgium; Betonsalon, Paris; Villa Medici, Rome; JOAN, LA; Picasso Museum, Barcelona, Spain; Theatre des Champs Elysees, Paris; Los Angeles Dance Project; LUMA Foundation, Arles, France; Human Resources, Los Angeles; FRAC Occitanie Montpellier, France; Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, Austria; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto;  University of Toronto Mississaugua, Toronto; La Ferme du Buisson, Noisiel; Mona Bismarck American Center, Paris; Silencio, Paris; LACMA, LA; Hammer Museum, LA; Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Project Space, New York; REDCAT, LA and Performa, NY.

She has taught classes, led workshops, and lectured at MoMA, NY; Queen Mary College, London; Beaux Arts de Paris, Paris; University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada; and Art Center, Otis College of Art & Design, UCLA, CalArts and more. Mast obtained an MFA from USC in 2009.

Organizational and Funding Credits 

Wonmi’s WAREHOUSE Programs is organized by Alex Sloane, Associate Curator, and is produced by Amelia Charter, Producer of Performance and Programs, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles

This performance is made possible by generous endowment support from Wonmi & Kihong Kwon and Family.

Performances at MOCA are supported by the MOCA Fund for Performance with generous funding provided by Betsy Greenberg and The Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund.

Wonmi's WAREHOUSE Programs is founded by Wonmi & Kihong Kwon and Family.