24-Hour Telethon Fundraiser (December 2016)
A 6.5 minute highlight reel of the Telethon here.
A more detailed written account of the 24 hours here.
For access to all 6 parts of the 24-hour Telethon, go to Piehole’s Facebook page, scroll to the videos and select “See All.”
In Fall 2016, in our 8th year as a theater collective, we experienced intense Fundraising Fatigue. But from the darkest of places can arrive the greatest innovations!
Through some combination of our love for public access media, the recent “Facebook Live” update, and...whim, we decided to collaborate with our favorite live TV-er, media artist Allen Riley, to do a 24-hour live telethon on Facebook Live, in which we would fill (whatever that may mean) 24 hours of onscreen time, in an effort to raise funds. We set up one of our apartments to look somewhere between a staged space and an actual home. We invited guests, collaborators and supporters for planned segments, and also offered an open invitation for anyone to drop by (providing the top secret address upon request), or call in and talk to us “on the air.” We hosted a range of guests who relate to the Piehole world in different capacities, some of whom performed and some of whom we interviewed about their own work. Some examples include: Allen Riley, who had hacked the FB Live system to allow for frames, filters and a two camera system and talked to us about utopian technology, Alec Duffy of JACK, Lauren Whitehead (poet, teacher, and theater artist), writer Chana Porter and one of her students from The Octavia project (a teen sci-fi writing program), and composer Deepali Gupta who sang to us about heartbreak while we cooked. One of our collaborators showed up a few times to juggle increasingly difficult objects, two collaborators came by on their way to a 6 AM flight to takes us through an exercise routine, while several people stopped by for a round of “what’s in the bag,” a game in which a person describes the contents of their bag. We included cooking demonstrations, horse drawing lessons, and some low-key song and dance performances. And we also spent a lot of delirious hours in boring ways....a reading from Anne of Green Gables while some people napped, a crossword puzzle being attempted in real time, and a game of scrabble played while someone read Moby Dick. In many ways, this 24-hour window into Piehole invited viewers into a full yet slow-paced universe that was there for you when you needed it. People tuned in during their breakfast, or late night when they were having trouble sleeping. People were moved to call in and cheer us on, they participated in absurd contests, and someone ordered crabs to be delivered to us. The telethon somehow became the most open and communal work we have ever created, because anyone could join in at any point, as publicly or as privately as they wanted to, and could give up as much or as little as they wanted in order to participate.
A more detailed written account of the 24 hours here.
For access to all 6 parts of the 24-hour Telethon, go to Piehole’s Facebook page, scroll to the videos and select “See All.”
In Fall 2016, in our 8th year as a theater collective, we experienced intense Fundraising Fatigue. But from the darkest of places can arrive the greatest innovations!
Through some combination of our love for public access media, the recent “Facebook Live” update, and...whim, we decided to collaborate with our favorite live TV-er, media artist Allen Riley, to do a 24-hour live telethon on Facebook Live, in which we would fill (whatever that may mean) 24 hours of onscreen time, in an effort to raise funds. We set up one of our apartments to look somewhere between a staged space and an actual home. We invited guests, collaborators and supporters for planned segments, and also offered an open invitation for anyone to drop by (providing the top secret address upon request), or call in and talk to us “on the air.” We hosted a range of guests who relate to the Piehole world in different capacities, some of whom performed and some of whom we interviewed about their own work. Some examples include: Allen Riley, who had hacked the FB Live system to allow for frames, filters and a two camera system and talked to us about utopian technology, Alec Duffy of JACK, Lauren Whitehead (poet, teacher, and theater artist), writer Chana Porter and one of her students from The Octavia project (a teen sci-fi writing program), and composer Deepali Gupta who sang to us about heartbreak while we cooked. One of our collaborators showed up a few times to juggle increasingly difficult objects, two collaborators came by on their way to a 6 AM flight to takes us through an exercise routine, while several people stopped by for a round of “what’s in the bag,” a game in which a person describes the contents of their bag. We included cooking demonstrations, horse drawing lessons, and some low-key song and dance performances. And we also spent a lot of delirious hours in boring ways....a reading from Anne of Green Gables while some people napped, a crossword puzzle being attempted in real time, and a game of scrabble played while someone read Moby Dick. In many ways, this 24-hour window into Piehole invited viewers into a full yet slow-paced universe that was there for you when you needed it. People tuned in during their breakfast, or late night when they were having trouble sleeping. People were moved to call in and cheer us on, they participated in absurd contests, and someone ordered crabs to be delivered to us. The telethon somehow became the most open and communal work we have ever created, because anyone could join in at any point, as publicly or as privately as they wanted to, and could give up as much or as little as they wanted in order to participate.