Alan Finneran, the director of Soon 3, came from San Francisco to the festival with a new piece called Black Water Echo. Finneran refers to the piece as a “task activated performance landscape.” He means that the performance consists primarily of a series of precise tasks, the performance of which alters the space (or landscape) of the piece, thereby dictating a new series of tasks that will further alter the landscape, dictating yet another series of tasks, and so on. By the end, the landscape has been radically changed and the audience has witnessed an entire biography of that change.

The basic landscape of Black Water Echo is a twenty foot square, marked on the floor with a covering of dark plastic. As the audience enters, the square is nearly empty: along its edges are arranged a series of objects that will be used throughout the performance.