About this project

The Festival will run October 13-22 and tickets can be used for any performances between those dates.  Wed-Sat at 8PM and Sun at 3PM.

The Exquisite Corpse Festival uses the surrealist parlor game to inspire collaborations in unlikely media and between unlikely artists. 

The original exquisite corpse was a writing/drawing game where multiple artists would come together to create a simple poem or drawing.  Instead of collaborating through communication and negotiating, they collaborate through play and trust.

Imagine a piece of paper folded in thirds.  Two lines are drawn across the top fold to represent the neck and two lines are drawn across the bottom fold to represent the waist.  The three artists pass the paper around them: one to draw the head, one to draw the body, and one to draw the legs...the catch is that once each artist is done, they fold the paper back so none of the artists can see what they have drawn.  It is only once the piece is complete and unfolded that the artists see what the others have drawn.  This controlled chaos creates the spark of friction rather than the stoic agreement.  The finished piece reveals startling juxtaposition and surprising connections, revealing more about what connects us rather than what separates us.

The Festival will take the corpse off the page and explore how artists can collaborate through the extreme trust of the corpse in theater, dance, music, tattoing, and event scores.  Unlike our past art shows where all we needed was wall space, we need a theater to present and support these pieces to their fullest.

The $3,000 goal will go to rent out the Richmond Shepard Theater for two weeks in October so that we will have a space to present the work of nine playwrights, nine directors, three tattoo artists, eighteen actors, three choreographers, three dancers, three composers, three costume designers, and many more that have come together!