Kickstarter

Katie Shook, Eric Lindley and Sibyl O'Malley are pleased to present the premiere of Erik Ehn's Star at Automata in Los Angeles this June. 

With original music and puppetry, Star conjures the hallucinatory visions of a jazz singer working at a Kansas City Starbucks and bent toward revenge. Insidious cultural and economic appropriations—smooth jazz and Salvadorian/Guatemalan/Rwandan coffee beans—permeate an atmosphere flitting with caffeine fairies, poisoned dogs, and the vague foreboding of consequence.

Star is the third collaboration between puppet artist Katie Shook and composer Eric Lindley. Last year they presented Lay Science, a puppet musical that explored the literal use-value of art using lay scientific measures at Machine Project in LA. Katie and Eric brought Sibyl O'Malley's play, Total Fox, to life with original music and puppetry last year and she joins them for Star as dramaturg.

Star is one of seventeen plays that make up Erik Ehn’s Soulographie, a durational performance event looking at 20th century genocides in the United States (the Tulsa Race Riots), in East Africa (Rwanda, Uganda) and Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador). Each play is being produced independently throughout the United States, Rwanda and Uganda and then will converge at La MaMa in New York this November as a twenty-four hour theatrical event.

Katie Shook, Eric Lindley and Erik Ehn at a Puppet Summit for Soulographie plays at Brown University. 

We are delighted to premiere Star at Automata, a non-profit organization dedicated to the creation, incubation, and presentation of experimental puppet theater, experimental film, and other contemporary art practices centered on ideas of artifice and performing objects. Automata was founded in 2004 by artists Susan Simpson and Janie Geiser.

We need to raise $10,000 to put up the show in LA and then take it to La MaMa in New York. Any money we come up with beyond our $5k goal for this campaign will contribute to us getting to New York. Thank you so much for your support!

Here's how Katie describes the design for Star: "We’re using table-top puppets, cardboard set pieces and sheets for projecting video to build what we’re calling a “modular box city.” It will be a busy world filled with coffee grinding, steam, noise and chaos, creating a machine of destruction, a machine that drives our protagonist to fulfill her revenge."

Eric describes the musical landscape this way: "Playing with the themes of cultural appropriation and hegemony in the script, I’m aiming to do to easy listening what smooth jazz did to jazz. Steal it, and use it to my own ends: chop up the sounds, and combine them into complex, difficult jazz harmonies and rhythms."

We hope you'll join us for the Los Angeles premiere on June 29 - July 1, 2012.

Our project has been generously supported with an ARC grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation. .

Below are pictures of some of the handmade thank you gifts we'll be giving our supporters!