Summer's tough. You don't want to do anything but go to the beach or run down to the swimming hole, but then you become paralyzed by the sense that you're not having enough fun, and things can really go down hill. Well, not for us, not this summer! Thanks to Piehole member Elliot Quick, Piehole friend Sophie Shackleton, and Sophie's incredibly generous parents WInk and Charlie, we went and did something. We went and did something on July 4th weekend, no less! An Artists Summit in Vermont, complete with bonfires, dancing, spiders, and tears. A group of 30-some people, mostly (but not entirely) theater artists, gathered in a barn filled with air mattresses to share meals and make work. We decided to use the time away from daily life to develop a Piehole Gym - to come up with exercises that we could use in our ongoing practice. Each day we drove away from the beautiful wooded vistas of our hosts' farm to run around in a moldy abandoned ski shop downtown. Sure, others might have been inspired by the babbling brooks and lush greenery back at home base, but you should have seen this crumbling dry-wall, these mysterious dead birds, this shattered TV in the middle of the floor! We loved it so much that we let our gym drift into less structured play, and a piece began to emerge - more details on that soon! Here we are having some fun:
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In May, just as we were asking ourselves these very questions, Piehole was invited to perform a short piece at what turned out to be perhaps the final installment of Ben Gansky's Cloud-City-dwelling performance series, new skin for the old ceremony--a title which cleverly must be in quotes or italic or bold or a different font because of its lack of capital letters.
Around that time we couldn't stop referencing a running joke we had about a satirical theater company, whose members were very similar to us in many respects, only with slightly less self-awareness and a slightly bigger budget. We joked that they were in an endless development cycle with their opus, an avant garde adaptation of 50s sitcom/grotesque mirror of sociopolitical neuroses Mister Ed. I think you know the show. A horse is a horse. So when we set out to make something new for new skin it became obvious to us that the clearest, most interesting challenge in our sights was to create a rigorously pursued, deeply felt piece based on an off-the-cuff lampoon of ourselves and our artistic community. i.e. Guys, what if we did the joke for real? So we did. Trying to Get the Horse to Talk (, or, It's Bigger Than the Both of Us) is an indefinite work in progress. An excerpt was shown at what turned out to be perhaps the final installment of Ben Gansky's Cloud-City-dwelling performance series, new skin for the old ceremony--a title which shrewdly must be in italic or bold or a different color because of its lack of capital letters. THANKS FOR TRYING TO BELIEVE IN STUFF WITH US!EVEN AFTER IT DIDN’T WORK OUT THE FIRST TIME... OR THE TIME BEFORE THAT...This piece, like most of what we do, is nothing without an audience of generous journeyers by our side as we venture into the unknown. Thanks so much for joining us again on this one. Check out the Old Paper Houses page for photos and video from the show, and, if you missed it this time, keep your ear to the ground for future chances to see Old Paper Houses.
Always dreamed of joining a utopian commune? Take this quiz to learn how you’d fare on the farm: 1. It’s the first day on the farm and it’s time to get to work. You open the tool shed and grab:
B. A pail and stool. You can’t wait to learn to milk that cow! C. Whatever’s left after everyone else picks. You’re just so excited to contribute. D. A pitchfork. What wonders surely lie within that pile of manure! E. A butter churn. How wonderful to see the unruly milk resolve itself into the dependable firmness of butter 2. After a long day of farming, you’re most likely to remark:
B. “Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionally brutified.” C. “For myself, I would not exchange this life for any I have ever led. I could not feel contented again with the life of isolated houses, and the conventions of civilization.” D. “What a sympathetic union we have found between intellectual and manual labor!” E. “Just keep working and the seas will turn to lemonade.” 3. What’s your favorite animal on the farm? Coming to IMAX this Summer: SEPTIMIUS FELTON & The Quest for the Elixir of Life I made this fake movie poster for this edition of the Chopping Block. It features our hero, a sociopathic, opportunist twerp from Revolutionary days. The Nathaniel Hawthorne novella Septimius Felton: Or, the Elixir of Life is a gothic romance and cosmological origin story for the United States as we know it.* Piehole encountered it via Bernadette Mayer, in a section of her epic poem Midwinter Day in which prosaic plot summaries of stories become a major motif. Mayer’s summary of Felton was originally recounted onstage by one of our Old Paper Houses characters, but for whatever reason it eventually met the fate of so many other wonderful texts—and was ruthlessly CHOPPED from the script. So, we offer it here: Today’s word isBOILERMAKER (n) -can refer to two types of beer cocktail, found commonly in the New England region. In American terminology, the drink consists of a glass of beer and a shot of whiskey. The beer is either served as a chaser or mixed with the whiskey.i.e. “People sit at home and drink boilermakers” (Bernadette Mayer, “Lookin’ Like Areas of Kansas”)VOCAB-U-GIF models: Allison LaPlatney and Benoit Johnson. Special thanks to VOCAB-U-GIF sponsor Narragansett.
OLD PAPER HOUSES opens next week! Well, it’s been a busy Fall for Piehole, what with all our devising and blogging and making elaborate dioramas. We’re taking some time off to rest and revive before heading back into Old Paper Houses rehearsals in early February. In the meantime, here’s an ecstatic moment from one of our early rehearsals to get you through the holidays. See you in 2014! In elementary school I was building a diorama for a book report assignment, and my 4-year-old sister (confused or precociously snarky) called it a “diarrhea-rama,” which should give a pretty good sense of the culture of my household. That particular diorama depicted a scene between Mrs. Frisby, a regular mouse, and Nicodemus, a genetically-enhanced rat, from Robert O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Only now do I realize that, by choosing this book about rodents for a diorama-based assignment, and thus scaling my diorama roughly to life, I was deftly fucking with the diorama medium!!! Or just fundamentally misunderstanding it. Although I really, really like the idea that dioramas are the invention and sole provenance of elementary school teachers, I could probably do some kind of obsessive genealogy of the diorama throughout history. I could trace this mutating medium from eerie taxidermies to discredited anthropologies behind museum glass; from Persian miniature painting to ancient narrative friezes; from adults goofing off in tableaux vivant to children getting serious with flimsy trompe l’oeil toy theater; architectural table models aspiring to full-scale reality, and boxed-in modernist fantasies intended to trouble it out of existence; Terra Cotta Warriors at attention in the dirt, and Mr. Rogers’ Land of Make-Believe one trolley-stop away; North Korean communist spectacle that shrinks the human and Vegas weddings that enlarge love with immersive kitsch; from puppet shows to panoramas to peep shows; shadow boxes and ships in bottles; cult shrines and curiosity cabinets; idol niches and Christ creches; Victorian dollhouses and Castle Greyskull playsets. And I could maybe explain why Piehole’s found this form useful in examining Transcendental utopias and New England winters. Sure, I could do that. |
Cover image by Carol Rosegg
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