IMAGINARY OBSERVABLE

Clocks, hourglasses, and birthday candles cover Mini Mart City Park’s gallery. A wandering neighborhood cat leads you into the space where you are free to explore the various objects and trinkets, all meticulously placed throughout the room. Alyza DelPan-Monley and Leah Crosby perform two new works in a split bill, Imaginary Observable, a CO– production partnered with Mini Mart City Park. DelPan-Monley shares new work, Keepsake, a story exploring the passing of time and clouds. Crosby shares The Marine Iguana, a tale of swimming and heart health. Coming together for an evening of storytelling and movement for a poetically whimsical evening.

An ode to analog, there is a typewriter, a record player, and a time punch on stage, accompanying the clocks. Images of clouds are hidden around as well, a globe painted with fluffy white over  blue sky matches DelPan-Monley’s white and blue costume. DelPan-Monley shows each audience member in the intimate venue an image of an airplane window with clouds floating past, and the piece takes off! Dancing as they narrate, DelPan-Monley’s fluid movement stretches like time with limbs moving smoothly and slowly. Interrupting the flowing movement, DelPan-Monley transforms, slipping on a white button-up, a neck tie, and a mask of a full moon with clock hands. Staccato and rhythmic shifts mimic a clock’s ticking. The different textures portray the different flowing and abrupt ways we experience the passage of time. Lying beneath a desk with legs propped up, they recall playing in an office while waiting for their mother to finish work. Finding creativity in cubicles, they would play productivity, mirroring their surroundings. 

“Time goes by so slowly for those who wait.” Moving in placed and swinging gestures, they hum Madonna’s “Hung Up,” repeating and reorganizing the lyrics. Contrasting this slowness, they recall a childhood memory of the overwhelming sensation of listening to multiple clocks tick over each other, as the ephemeral and endless seconds pass. Resulting in a nervous breakdown rocking and repeating the phrase “time goes too fast!” over and over. As time flies and slows, they begin to find comfort in clouds. Clouds are traced with finger tips, and DelPan-Monley notes how it’s a lot like tracing a moment. Holding a fluffy wool cloud in their palm, the moment is released when the cloud floats up to the heavens on fishing wire. 

The piece ends with an invitation to become attuned to the present. Winding a long string of paper woven together on a spindle, they unwind a long piece and approach the audience. “Would you like to hold a bit of today?” they ask. The string of paper reads “today today today…” about four hundred times over. Placing a section of this long strip of paper in the hands of each audience member, the crowd is invited to take “today” and place it on the wall to create a collage cloud of the strung-together todays. 

Taking us from the sky to the sea, Crosby also traces moments from childhood. A bubble machine whirs as a stream of bubbles flows from the corner in blue light. The bubbles arc and Crosby emerges in a one piece bathing suit and goggles, swimming out from being folded in a cabinet. A track of their voice begins to recall sensations of swimming and detailed knowledge of the marine iguana. Transparent colorful containers, shadow puppets, and illuminated objects create layered images on an overhead projector, operated throughout with help from Logan Tillery, illustrating the narrative of the audio track. Subway cars and swimming pools, strawberry candies and text messages. Lying horizontally on Mini Mart’s kitchen counter, Crosby flutters their legs, motioning swimming. They find themself identifying more and more with the marine iguana after being diagnosed with a rare and unexplainable heart condition. The shared love of swimming and similar social behaviors allows them to make sense of things when the doctors cannot. The intensity of the medical stories are cut with bizarre props and humorous pantomiming or facial expressions. These stories weave through swimming, friendships with other people that resemble aquatic animals, and matters of the heart. 

Marine iguanas can dramatically slow their heart rates in the water to conserve oxygen and survive cold ocean temperatures. Crosby finds connection to the iguana’s unique hearts after doctors cannot explain why their heart behaves irregularly. Describing how a surgical bed felt like lying on a diving board, they place a large inflatable blue gummy bear on the projector’s table, transforming it into an operating table. The overhead light illuminates the patient. The audiotrack begins describing a memory of being awake for open heart surgery as Tillery assists Crosby in miming the procedure on the inflatable bear. This playful and abstract representation softens the fearfulness. After the inconclusive operation, Crosby slips on a sweatshirt wrapped and tangled with string lights flashing green and blue, then red and yellow. The lights dance across their chest like electrical properties of biological cells as their arms reach out openly, softly swimming. 

Returning to the passage of time and acceptance, they light three birthday candles on a cupcake. They raise their arms and open their mouths to blow, holding the pose, then walking away from the cupcake, leaving the candles lit to melt into the frosting. Stepping outside, they begin jump roping rapidly, getting their heart rate up. The marine iguana embedded throughout the story becomes, as put by Crosby, “a marker of resilience, change, and control.” When the expected behavior is rejected, it does not make it wrong. The refusal to blow out the candles and let them melt through the ending duration of the piece marks that moment in time, similarly to DelPan-Monley’s reckoning of moments. Shedding the electric coat and getting their heart rate up is a moving call to the body’s resilience and adaptability. 

Presence becomes the bridge between these two poetic and narrative works. Presence to the body carves out space for deeper understanding and healing in The Marine Iguana. What was unexplainable by medicine finds resolution in the emotional. Movement by the end becomes a tool to facilitate presence to the body’s resilience and strength. The iguana becomes a creature that guides the performer and audience toward embodiment and acceptance. In Keepsake, it is attunement to the clouds that helps the performer connect with the present moment. The memories, stories, analog, and invitation work to take the audience on a journey through time to become aware of what’s right in front of them. Combating cultures that demand constant productivity, DelPan-Monley creates a whimsical landscape of relics from the past, inviting us to embody the present. Playing with memories, moments, and ephemerality, the two go deep while finding ways to keep things delightfully zany. 

Imaginary Observable ran January 29-31, 2026 at Mini Mart City Park. It was a CO-NDUIT production from CO-. More info about the program can be found HERE.