Podcasting

August 30, 2018

In 2018 I launched Nobody Knows, a comedic question-and-answer podcast with Mason Rosenthal. Each short episode begins with a listener's question to which Mason (in his title role as "Nobody") records an answer and then sends me the recording to edit, sound design, and release online. The series began as a sequel to our play, Nobody's Home, and drew in over 1,000 listeners within its first month of release.

Sample episodes:

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Medium Theatre

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Above: Shots from the Nobody Knows installation at the 2018 Fun-A-Day Art Show in Philadelphia.

Triptych

November 1, 2014

I made a triptych of theatrical experiments in 2014–15 that ran somewhere between my practices of performance and teaching. Each began as a workshop that worked from a specific medium (still image, movement, or sound) toward making theatrical performance.

Videos here are from the "12 Tones" workshop series whose participants first created sounds, turned them into movements, and then united these into quick performances.

A finite set of neuroscientific 2-person movements formed the basis for "8 Moves" and a set of specific objects was entitled "6 Chairs." Click the titles to view portfolio monographs for each:

6 Chairs
8 Moves
12 Tones

Dis/ability Ethnography

June 30, 2013

Logo for Argentina's green cane law, which designates people with low vision.

Dis/ability performance and notions of dis/ability “passing” moved to the forefront of my work in 2014. I make performances that investigate that line between "dis" and "abled" by asking performers and audiences to cross it in various directions. In Nobody's Home (2013) the audience spends about a third of the show with their eyes closed. In Alchemy (2014) certain performers have limited use of eyes, hands, mouth, or body altogether, and audiences wrestled with assumptions and prejudices around that. I performed my solo memoir Cones (2015) blindfolded and the audience also engaged part of the show doing certain things with eyes closed. And since playing the blind prophet Tiresias in Antigone (2016) I've been typecast as a visually-impaired actor in preference to fully-sighted actors assuming the roles of low-vision characters.

Alongside this work has a been a blog called Rods & Cones about the spectrum of vision and blindness in art, media, science and culture. I have also taught classes on the subject at Cornell University, Goddard College, the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, and through the Headlong Performance Institute.

Above: Sighted actors perform blind characters in The Miracle Worker (1962), The Tale of Zatochi (1962), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), Daredevil (2015), Star Wars: Rogue One (2016), and the video for Lionel Ritchie's song "Hello" (1984). Whether products of biography, fiction, or fantasy, all these blind characters are depicted as having extraordinary powers

Rutherfurd Hall

March 1, 2012

For five years I was a regular artist-in-residence at Rutherfurd Hall, a historic mansion in northwest New Jersey. While there I directed and performed in seven devised plays that moved actors and audience about the building, each drawing from local history, folklore, and science (Lewis Morris Rutherfurd was a pioneer in the field of astrophotography).

Click here to read show notes for the following plays:

The Sea of Tranquility
Alchemy
The Gauntlet

Photos by Amy Hufnagel, route map by Morgan FitzPatrick Andrews.

Picture Performances: A History

July 1, 2010

I published one section of my undergraduate thesis as "Picture Performance: A History from Power Point to Cave Painting." Click here to see the full text.

In the essay I reveal histories of wandering oral storytellers whose version of events runs counter to those told by people in power. They told their stories by pointing at pictures while singing or speaking, using this combined visual and oral evidence to sway their audiences.

Examples here include a Moritadasenger c. 1700, Wayang Beber c. 1900, Cantastoria and Al Gore, both c. 2000s.

When Magic Confronts Authority

April 15, 2007

In 2007 I contributed a chapter to the AK Press anthology Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority. Click here to read see the full text.

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My chapter traces the history of political puppetry from ancient tradition of picture theatre and medieval pageants, to the labor, civil rights and anti-war movements of the 20ths century, leading to large demonstrations organized against corporate globalization at the start of the 21st century.

Photo Credits: The Bread & Puppet Theater's Domestic Resurrection Circus (Paul Petroof, 1985), prisoners display survey results for the quincentennial of Columbus' arrival in the Americas (Clare Dolan, 1992), float about the Spanish Civil War at the 1939 May Day Parade in New York's Union Square (1939, John Albok), "The Corporate Power Tower" at Chicago's Active Resistance (Susan Simensky Bietila, 1996). Book cover art and design by Erik Ruin and Josh MacPhee.

Mostly Hairless Ape Dreams

January 6, 2007

In 2005 I wrote a number of short stories and adapted them into a touring toy theatre show. Among these were the “Mostly Hairless Ape Dreams,” performed as a three-part dream sequence with shadow puppets and chance music. These originally appeared in book form at the first Fun-A-Day happening in Philadelphia, then as part of a theatre piece that toured to festivals around the U.S. with puppeteer Eli Nixon. In 2007 I remounted “Mostly Hairless Ape Dreams” with shadow artist Erik Ruin as part of “Mushroom Music,” a show inspired by the writings of John Cage that toured the East Coast. More recently I recreated these stories as this 8-minute experiment in audio storytelling. The opening bit about the butterfly is from John Cage’s one-minute collection, Indeterminacy:

Appearances:

Part of “The Little Books” at Fun-A-Day Philadelphia (2005)
In the “Where Do Things Belong?” East Coast tour with Eli Nixon (2005)
In the “Going Nowhere” East Coast tour with Erik Ruin (2007)
At Goddard College’s IBA Winter Cabaret (2007)
At Great Small Works’ “Sound & Shadow” Spaghetti Dinner, Judson Church, NYC (2007)

Wikipedia Articles

April 16, 2006

Once in a while I discover something I want to know has been under-researched. The information is out there, stuffed deep in the stacks of libraries or floating on the strands of the World Wide Web, but without much dedicated aggregation.

Making a Wikipedia article is one way to put all that data into a handy place, to connect loose threads, and to invite a community of detail-obsessed editors to add what they might know.

Here's a sampling of entries I started and regularly maintain. Some have attained “good article” status on Wikipedia:

El Wahsh.jpg — Social Thriller

With the release of *Get Out* in 2017, director Jordan Peele propelled the genre of **social thriller** into notoriety—at least in the United States. Meanwhile India's biggest film star touted the genre a year before Peele as a way to finally make political films palatable to Bollywood fans. On both sides of the globe scant film makers and a slew of film critics were bandying the term about for decades hence to describe the work of Sidney Poitier, Spencer Tracy, Claude Chabrol, Aleksandr Faintsimmer and many others. So what is a social thriller anyway?
**Read article**

Reagan Montage.jpg — Ronald Reagan in Music

Although the presence of **Ronald Reagan in music** often draws associations to the punk rock counter-culture of the 1980s, it dates back much earlier. During the 1960s, folk, rock and satirical musicians jabbed at him for his red-baiting, attacks on free speech, and violent backlash against political dissent. He first appeared on album covers in the 1950s during his time as a Hollywood actor, well before his political career. Post-presidency (and post-Reagan altogether) he remains an icon and pariah for artists in many genres.
**Read article**

Oprical Sound

The **optical sound** technology for synching dialogue with a motion picture is about as old as talking pictures themselves. Few may be aware that It's the same technology used by naval ships to transmit secret codes, by Walt Disney to record his greatest film, and by proto-punk art-band Devo to produce weird sounds on their early recordings.
**Read article**

Holyoke Range.jpg — Tofu Curtain

A mountain range in Massachusetts, a commercial corridor in Melbourne, and a cultural divide between East Asia and the rest of the world have all been nicknamed "the **Tofu Curtain**." But if one looks a little closer at what's happening in these regions, one might notice these soy-based drapes are thinner than they seem.
**Read article**

Mecki Mark Men

The first Swedish rock band to tour the U.S. often found themselves hedging Hendrix and Zappa, floundering between success and disaster, and bridging protest culture and high art. Ultimately the longest lasting contribution of Stockholm's **Mecki Mark Men** may have been scoring the Swedish language version of the musical *Hair* lest we forget the legacy of a racist dope-smoking hedgehog.
**Read article**