Kickstarter

Hello Friends,

I am directing a puppet play that is part of the Soulographie Cycle of plays by Erik Ehn that will be performing at La Mama in NYC in about one week!  We need to raise $3000 to pay for plane tickets, the rehearsal space, supplies,  and performer/designer stipends.   We would really appreciate your help and would love you come and see the play.  

The play follows Rory, an executioner from Texas, who takes an unexcused leave and finds himself alone, as a puppet, in Central America on a delirious and wayward path to repair his broken morality.  Instead, he continues to come undone as he encounters the impossible vastness of his recovery that link him to events in Central America and his own past. 

Our cast and designers are as follows:

• Director:  Laurie O'Brien
• Composer/Sound Designer: Kari Rae Seekins
• Lighting Designer:  Julianna Rusakiewicz
• Performers:  Charlie Del Risco, James Simmons, Eric Lindley, Louiza Collins, and Alyssum D'Aoust.   

Our Budget---how we will spend the funds

• Rehearsal space for 5 days = $300
• Stipend for 5 actor/puppeteers $300 each = $1,500
• Stipend for 2 designers $300 each = $600
• Plane tickets for designer --Los Angeles to NYC = $400
• Building Materials = $200
• Total = $3000

Soulographie

Soulographie is a durational performance event looking at 20th century America from the point of view of its relationship to genocides in the States (the Tulsa Race Riot), in East Africa (Rwanda, Uganda), and Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador). We aim to create channels of dialogue through art and conversation.  You can read more on the Soulographie website below.  

http://www.soulographie.org

Tickets at lamama.org--we are performing 2 shows. 

Thursday, November 15th at 9:15  https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/pe/9730992

Sunday, November 18th at 7:30  https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/store/42/packages

Rewards

Below is a sample of rewards you will receive from your donation.  

Director's Notes from Erik Ehn workshop at Brown University January 2012   

Soulographie, Architecture and Genocide

• Soulographie is problematic
• It is a space for waiting and listening with compassion
• There is a sense of helplessness
• We are not explaining 
• We create an emptiness, a helplessness
• Puppets release pressure and create distance
• There is care and compassion in working with puppets
• Architecture is about an interior darkness
• The antithesis is witness  
• Witness is as sophisticated as it gets
• Produced like a collective not a theater 
• All plays have the cycle of victim, perpetrator and witness

shape, architecture

Published in From Erik on April 3, 2011

How does one progress in grief? One moves into a state, a definitional ending, and to witness the stillness, one grows still. Once you have stopped moving, how do you ever move again? How does witness to disaster not end in disaster?

The language must remain unstable. Because the state one is describing is not, in fact, absolute, it is (if it is at all possible to use this word with a kind of structural neutrality) a creative space; this is why some artists even work themselves up into a state of simulated despair (unnecessary, since there is plenty already on hand, and more that will come for you). Genocide keeps happening, keeps iterating, in the survivor and the survivor’s generations. The witness must likewise enter it in instability, and apply language that never settles. The violent heart of disaster is a rending instability. A witness is obliged to enter the field of grief as wide open, architecturally/chemically as the traumatic circumstances, but biased towards creation – each rip/rending is an opening, a magical halving that perpetuates bounty (the loaves and fishes found miracle in breaking).