Performance
Photo Credit: Thatcher Hayward
Delivering Democracy
During the climax of the 2020 electoral struggle, I and my colleagues created Delivering Democracy: A troupe of dancing mailboxes and ballot boxes that performed around Pennsylvania (including two stilt-walking mailboxes—our “air-mail” contingent, and an accordion-playing mailbox).
COINTELSHOW: A Patriot Act
Join Special Agent Christian White on a cheerfully creepy tour of the FBI’s notorious Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). The federal documents are heavily censored in the name of the Freedom of Information Act. But when Chris takes you beneath the redaction marks, into the haunted underworld that lies beneath, things go horribly, fabulously wrong.
ECONOMUSIC: Keeping Score
Economusic converts socioeconomic data into music. The performer “conducts” a group-participatory experience that shows the simultaneity of social processes through “economusical chords.” For example, I have the audience hum/sing the Incarceration Rate while I “harmonize” on my flute with the Unemployment Rate. The audience members feel the data in their ears, larynxes, and lungs as they “sing along.” There is noise, then quiet, then disquiet.
GGPS: The Guillermo Gómez-Peña Global Positioning System
Bogad is guided and goaded by a “GGPS” system (in his car? in his mind?) as he explores an existential performance-activist landscape in this “auto”-ethnography. Geographical “lost-ness” is quickly subsumed by political and ethical dilemmas and directions as the artists argue, agree, and head for the borderlands.
A Fair Fight
This piece tells my family story of boxers, bootleggers and speak-easy operators on the Lower East Side of New York in the 1920s and 30s, and their armed confrontation with the KKK in upstate New York. The paintings and drawings projected during the show are original works of art by my 86-year old father.
Authoritarian Body
This piece works with an absurd science fiction premise to reveal, and reflect on, the overlapping and at times contradictory performance scripts of Mussolini, Putin, G.W. Bush, and Trump from the perspective of a cosmonaut/performance studies scholar of the far future.
GLAMORGEDDON: Limonauts Gamble for the City of Saint Francis
Glamorgeddon enlists the audience to “punch up” in their own original comedic improvisation, embodying and satirizing the oppressor with the constant prompts and event structure provided by ritual, costume party, a card game, and a pink stretch disco Humvee limousine.
A Word From our Sponsors
In this short commercial announcement, which I mix into the intermissions of many of my pieces, I thank the historical forces who made this situation possible, and call for a world in which they are no longer necessary.
Shotgun Players asked folks to submit a two-minute video that had to include "ten seconds of movement, the passage of time, three lines or more from a play, and a mask or toilet paper." This is what I came up with. Folks have commented that they liked what I did with the "ten seconds of movement." As you can see, sheltering in place has had a little effect on my psyche. Watch now.