Or, Piehole Animates! (Part 3)

The Pie Roll proudly presents the web debut of

GORY LESLIE by Emily Friend Roberts

This new short animated film debuted in super-spooky October 2011 at the Philadelphia Film & Animation Festival and the Royal Flush Film Festival in NYC. It was made by preeminent Piehole Emily, and features music by Lawrence Bonk

Keep your eyes peeling for loads more wonderful and upsetting stories about bodies from your friends at Piehole.

Or, Piehole Animates! (Part 2)

This is the first part of an animated retelling of a terrifying old Lincolnshire folktale by noted Piehole Jeff and with music by The Polyps (Raf Spielman) of Portland, OR.

Yallery Brown, part 1

Look for more of its demented aesthetic as it continues to deteriorate in further yucky installments, culminating in a truly traumatic interactive/invasive live performance entitled THE YALLERY BROWN EXPERIENCE.

Piehole just received a grant from The Mental Insight Foundation for $1000.00. We were excited when they sought us out and invited us to apply for this grant, and we can’t wait to put this money to use making daring new work. This is the third grant that Piehole has received this year, beginning with a Space Grant from Brooklyn Arts Exchange and a grant from the Puppeteers of America Endowment Fund! This support, along with that of the Piehole community, has enabled us to create theater that is truly collaborative and experimental.  We are extremely grateful.

Piehole was honored to be part of AXA IN ACTION, a Festival of Performing Arts at Hotel AXA in Prague in early December. Artists from around the world converged at this historic hotel to create site specific performances and installations in its many rooms. Piehole’s contribution to this temporary community was a short, wordless piece about what happens when two people from different worlds accidentally create a whole new one in the space of ten minutes. The piece was co-created and performed by Alice Winslow and Allison LaPlatney, developed/co-directed by Tara Ahmadinejad and Jeff Wood, with animations by Emily Friend Roberts.

To see how much the Czech press loved us, “czech” out this video: http://www.ceskatelevize.cz/ct24/kultura/155563-axa-in-action-hotel-vzhuru-nohama/

For more info about the festival:  http://www.axa-hotel.cz/axainaction/

Great news!  Piehole has been fortunate to receive a generous Space Grant from Brooklyn Arts Exchange, allowing us access to beautiful, rent-free space for most of this summer’s 2 Stories rehearsal process.  We’ve also received a Puppeteers of America Endowment Fund grant, which has gone toward developing the puppetry elements of our show.  We thank both of these organizations for their contributions to our project, and to the arts communities of Brooklyn and American puppetry, respectively, to both of which we proudly belong!

Finally, 2 Stories That End in Suicide is sponsored by Artspire, a program of New York Foundation of the Arts, which means that you can make a tax-deductible donation to the project right now, by CLICKING HERE. Thanks so much for your support, we greatly appreciate every cent donated, encouraging word given, and pair of eyes/ears/buttocks in our audiences!

Donna Clementina holds court amidst the porticoes of Torino

Some ‘holes recently made and installed this video in the bread aisle at Met Foods on Vanderbilt Ave (between Prospect and Park Pl) in Brooklyn. It is based on that grocery store, its employees, the jokes they tell, and its customers.

Grocery Story

Thanks to everyone for 3 wonderful (and sold out) houses at the Brick, during our run in their Iranian Theater Festival, AND for making our Kickstarter campaign a success—we couldn’t do it without you!

In the meantime, stay hungry for paranoia, obsession, and rapidly shuffling identities, in the final(?) version of

2 Stories That End in Suicide

Ur-Pieholes draft a lost 2 Stories prototype in the Iranian Italian countryside.

We recently completed our run as part of Columbia Stages’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Riverside Theater.  Thanks to a barrage of great audiences!

Doing the impossible.

Laying bare Man's Basic Dilemma.

Piehole has been furiously building and rehearsing around the clock in our collaboration with James Rutherford. Check out some of the puppets and decoy puppets we have built so far!

Come join us for a workshop of our newest project, 2 Stories that End in Suicide, at ZORA SPACE in Park Slope.

In the early 1950’s, Cesare Pavese and Sadegh Hedayat committed suicide within eight months of each other. In Piehole’s 2 Stories that End in Suicide, a young Iranian woman becomes a hybrid of these two authors in order to tell a story of Italian socialites who seem suspiciously like young Iranians with increasing compulsions to censor themselves. Using puppetry, video, and live actors, 2 Stories investigates private and public suffering and the impossibility of identity in a climate of repression.

We’ll be performing a few scenes from this work-in-progress – featuring puppets, strange contraptions, and your friends Tara Ahmadinejad, Patrick Harrison, Allison LaPlatney, Alice Winslow, and Jeff Wood – followed by some hanging out at the Zora Space bar/cafe — Please join us, and expect pleasant vibes! We are excited to include the Piehole community in the development of this project– your feedback and support are invaluable to us!