The History of Piehole
In 2005, before we knew we were Pieholes, a bunch of Pieholes made TOD & I at Brown University in Piehole, Rhode Island. In 2008, we further developed the show and the puppets and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn, as part of Film Festival: A Theater Festival. When our shows at The Brick sold out, we realized what a loyal Piehole community existed in New York. Thanks to them (YOU) and the great review in the Village Voice, our show at The Brick got extended. In September, we took Tod & I to Philly Fringe 2008 at 941 Theater for a three show run, receiving critical praise from the Philadelphia City Paper. Around the same time, in Summer 2008, Piehole member Tara Ahmadinejad performed her solo show S.H.A.V.E.D., directed by Willow Norton, at Pageant: Soloveev as part of Philly Fringe 2008. With the contributions of a few Pieholes, S.H.A.V.E.D. received critical praise from City Paper in Philly, who selected it as a “Fest Bet” for the Fringe. In February, Piehole participated in Electric Pear’s Synesthesia 2009 with our piece, Tenticle: A Canticle. We later performed Tenticle at the gallery Lapinski Studios, as part of The Co-Op’s group show, “Everything Good in Life” in June 2009.
Piehole’s next production, [The American Museum of] Love & Geography, had its first run at Vox Populi during Philly Fringe 2009, and went on to HERE Arts Center in October 2009. After a dislocated knee and elbow (experienced by Love & Geo's leading lady Alice Winlsow), a car accident with one fatality (a mailbox), and a very enthusiastic audience reception in Philly and NYC, we recouped our expenses, and then some, in December 2009’s In the Hole Fundraiser, hosted by our friends at Magicland in Williamsburg. This night of fun allowed us to celebrate the wonderful support of the larger Piehole community, as well as our roots (i.e PIE, which we sold along with other comestibles). In June 2010 we collaborated with Lea Bertucci and Ed Bear for Bushwick Open Studios to create Mutator, a seven-hour installation featuring three live performances, ghosts, snacks, shadow puppetry, and transistor radios. Piehole next collaborated, over one intense month of creation and rehearsal, with James Rutherford and Columbia Stages on A Midsummer Night's Dream. We designed and puppeteered a pair of metallic wings, a toolbelt-donkeyhead, a bevy of fairies made of junk and lighting fixtures, as well as portraying the Rude Mechanicals, and topping it all off with an original silent adaptation of the Play-Within-a-Play, using the original Ovid text, life-sized shadow and 2D puppetry, animated video backdrops and a carnivorous set piece.
While we were making accidental magic in the forest, our next piece, 2 Stories that End in Suicide, started to percolate. Beginning as an exploration of two wildly different novels – Cesare Pavese’s Among Women Only and Sadegh Hedayet’s The Blind Owl – 2 Stories became a fantastical whirl-i-gig of puppets, projections, censorship and subversion presented in full at HERE Arts Center’s Autumn Artists Lodge in Fall 2011. We developed the show over 2010 and 2011 by inviting our smart and critical audience to see two work-in-progress presentations, at Zora Space in Brooklyn (R.I.P.) and as part of the Brick Theatre’s Iranian Theatre Festival. The gods of grants and fundraising also smiled kindly on Piehole while we explored 2 Stories – in addition to receiving fiscal sponsorship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, we received a space grant from the Brooklyn Arts Exchange and a grant from Puppeteers of America. Perhaps the most gratifying windfall, however, was our tremendously successful Kickstarter campaign, which made us undeniably misty-eyed.
The winter of 2011/2012 saw a change of pace (and place!) for Piehole when we were invited to participate in the AXA in Action Festival, an immersive arts experience at the AXA Hotel in Prague. Our site specific piece Please Make up Room explored the breadth of two lives imagined in the space of ten minutes in a single hotel room. We were thrilled to share our work with an international audience – even the small dog who became irate with each swell in the music. December also brought another gift in the form of a grant from The Mental Insight Foundation. Fearing we might become too happy-go-lucky, we turned our attention to an enigmatic art-book produced from an awkward one-off collaboration between Samuel Beckett and Jasper Johns. Working with experimental musician Lea Bertucci and choreographer Rebecca Warner, and with the support of director Tara Ahmadinejad’s MFA program at Columbia University, we riffed on this book of prose and prints about failure, creating a critique of objecthood using dance, video, and trash; we finally shared this first version of Hand Foot Fizzle Face with the world in June 2012 at Triple Canopy in Brooklyn. While basking in Beckett’s rich prose, we also took a slight detour for some site-specific historical murder mystery fun, joining our friends in 3 Sticks (a Brooklyn-based physical theater company) for a night of theater and beer at One-Arm Red in DUMBO. Our short piece, Mysterious Murder, developed over the course of two weeks as a meditation on a real unsolved murder (w/ sensational dismemberment) in 19th-century Brooklyn, opened each evening with a burst of shadow puppetry and whiskey.
Continuing to develop work with the support of Columbia University, we turned next to Bertolt Brecht’s 1926 comedy with songs A Man's a Man. Examining our uncomfortable feelings of comfortable detachment from overseas violence, A Man's a Man had us traipsing through the Indian jungle singing original music by Jason Sigal and sinking with each step into the heat, madness and brutality of modern warfare. When we emerged from the jungle in January, 2013, we were struck by a bitter blast of winter wind, so Piehole huddled together and warmed ourselves with the light of two new source texts: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance and Bernadette Mayer’s The Golden Book of Words. As the spring finally began to blossom in New York, we emerged with a new devised piece that traveled between the snowdrifts of 1970s Massachusetts and the hayfields of an 1840s Transcendental Utopia. We shared a work-in-progress showing of Old Paper Houses at Columbia University’s Schapiro Theatre in April 2013, and continued to develop the project through the subsequent year, presenting its next iteration at the Connelly Theater in March, 2014.
Since our time at the Connelly, we've continued to develop Old Paper Houses and search for the perfect space to host a full run on this meditation on utopian longing. We've also begun to percolate some other new pieces: one based on the Swedish young adult novel Ronia the Robber's Daughter, another based on an abandoned ski shop in rural Vermont, and a third based on a long running joke about an experimental theater company creating a radical reinterpretation of the 1960s television sitcom Mister Ed.
Congratulations on reading all the way through this very detailed history of Piehole. As a reward, here is a picture of a giraffe looking longingly at a pie:
Piehole’s next production, [The American Museum of] Love & Geography, had its first run at Vox Populi during Philly Fringe 2009, and went on to HERE Arts Center in October 2009. After a dislocated knee and elbow (experienced by Love & Geo's leading lady Alice Winlsow), a car accident with one fatality (a mailbox), and a very enthusiastic audience reception in Philly and NYC, we recouped our expenses, and then some, in December 2009’s In the Hole Fundraiser, hosted by our friends at Magicland in Williamsburg. This night of fun allowed us to celebrate the wonderful support of the larger Piehole community, as well as our roots (i.e PIE, which we sold along with other comestibles). In June 2010 we collaborated with Lea Bertucci and Ed Bear for Bushwick Open Studios to create Mutator, a seven-hour installation featuring three live performances, ghosts, snacks, shadow puppetry, and transistor radios. Piehole next collaborated, over one intense month of creation and rehearsal, with James Rutherford and Columbia Stages on A Midsummer Night's Dream. We designed and puppeteered a pair of metallic wings, a toolbelt-donkeyhead, a bevy of fairies made of junk and lighting fixtures, as well as portraying the Rude Mechanicals, and topping it all off with an original silent adaptation of the Play-Within-a-Play, using the original Ovid text, life-sized shadow and 2D puppetry, animated video backdrops and a carnivorous set piece.
While we were making accidental magic in the forest, our next piece, 2 Stories that End in Suicide, started to percolate. Beginning as an exploration of two wildly different novels – Cesare Pavese’s Among Women Only and Sadegh Hedayet’s The Blind Owl – 2 Stories became a fantastical whirl-i-gig of puppets, projections, censorship and subversion presented in full at HERE Arts Center’s Autumn Artists Lodge in Fall 2011. We developed the show over 2010 and 2011 by inviting our smart and critical audience to see two work-in-progress presentations, at Zora Space in Brooklyn (R.I.P.) and as part of the Brick Theatre’s Iranian Theatre Festival. The gods of grants and fundraising also smiled kindly on Piehole while we explored 2 Stories – in addition to receiving fiscal sponsorship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, we received a space grant from the Brooklyn Arts Exchange and a grant from Puppeteers of America. Perhaps the most gratifying windfall, however, was our tremendously successful Kickstarter campaign, which made us undeniably misty-eyed.
The winter of 2011/2012 saw a change of pace (and place!) for Piehole when we were invited to participate in the AXA in Action Festival, an immersive arts experience at the AXA Hotel in Prague. Our site specific piece Please Make up Room explored the breadth of two lives imagined in the space of ten minutes in a single hotel room. We were thrilled to share our work with an international audience – even the small dog who became irate with each swell in the music. December also brought another gift in the form of a grant from The Mental Insight Foundation. Fearing we might become too happy-go-lucky, we turned our attention to an enigmatic art-book produced from an awkward one-off collaboration between Samuel Beckett and Jasper Johns. Working with experimental musician Lea Bertucci and choreographer Rebecca Warner, and with the support of director Tara Ahmadinejad’s MFA program at Columbia University, we riffed on this book of prose and prints about failure, creating a critique of objecthood using dance, video, and trash; we finally shared this first version of Hand Foot Fizzle Face with the world in June 2012 at Triple Canopy in Brooklyn. While basking in Beckett’s rich prose, we also took a slight detour for some site-specific historical murder mystery fun, joining our friends in 3 Sticks (a Brooklyn-based physical theater company) for a night of theater and beer at One-Arm Red in DUMBO. Our short piece, Mysterious Murder, developed over the course of two weeks as a meditation on a real unsolved murder (w/ sensational dismemberment) in 19th-century Brooklyn, opened each evening with a burst of shadow puppetry and whiskey.
Continuing to develop work with the support of Columbia University, we turned next to Bertolt Brecht’s 1926 comedy with songs A Man's a Man. Examining our uncomfortable feelings of comfortable detachment from overseas violence, A Man's a Man had us traipsing through the Indian jungle singing original music by Jason Sigal and sinking with each step into the heat, madness and brutality of modern warfare. When we emerged from the jungle in January, 2013, we were struck by a bitter blast of winter wind, so Piehole huddled together and warmed ourselves with the light of two new source texts: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance and Bernadette Mayer’s The Golden Book of Words. As the spring finally began to blossom in New York, we emerged with a new devised piece that traveled between the snowdrifts of 1970s Massachusetts and the hayfields of an 1840s Transcendental Utopia. We shared a work-in-progress showing of Old Paper Houses at Columbia University’s Schapiro Theatre in April 2013, and continued to develop the project through the subsequent year, presenting its next iteration at the Connelly Theater in March, 2014.
Since our time at the Connelly, we've continued to develop Old Paper Houses and search for the perfect space to host a full run on this meditation on utopian longing. We've also begun to percolate some other new pieces: one based on the Swedish young adult novel Ronia the Robber's Daughter, another based on an abandoned ski shop in rural Vermont, and a third based on a long running joke about an experimental theater company creating a radical reinterpretation of the 1960s television sitcom Mister Ed.
Congratulations on reading all the way through this very detailed history of Piehole. As a reward, here is a picture of a giraffe looking longingly at a pie:
