Thoughts: BareBones
Tonight I had the distinct pleasure of attending the BareBones Halloween Puppet Extravaganza. If you live in the Twin Cities and haven’t seen this production or heard of this company, you absolutely must acquaint yourself. (The good news is that you still have two chances to catch this year’s show.) Although I’m still reeling from the performance, I do have a few pertinent thoughts to share on the matter.
If you read my post about All Hallow’s Read, you’ll know that I a.) love Hallowe’en and b.) am supremely interested in finding meaningful traditions with which to mark the holiday. Having discovered the BareBones show, I know that I need look no further. Everything about this particular production is exactly what I would hope for: it’s an outdoor performance in the lovely late October air, it’s built and executed in large part by community volunteers, and it’s a beautiful multicultural celebration of the fine line between life and death as well as those who have crossed from one side to the next. It’s also a spectacle riddled with large puppets, aerialists, stilters, and pyrotechnics. As you enter the playing space, you descend into a world of pitch black skies illuminated with a combination of flickering paper bag luminaries and fluorescent day-glo lamps. Music evocative of this time and others, this place and others, fills the woody hollow along with the voices of thousands of excited theatergoers. On top of it all, you are greeted (stalked?) by several big, beautiful puppets as you make your way to your seat. What’s not to love?
A Fistful of Dirt: How the Death Was Won is a loosely bound tale that is part Japanese folktale, part Spaghetti Western. It is the story of a tengu king who decides to do away with Death and, with the help of his tengu cronies, destroys the Book of the Dead, rendering all life on Earth unable to pass through the Veil between this world and the next for over 150 years. As he does so, he traps a wayward Traveler in his irreverent, never ending, “No Death” party. The festivities are interrupted, however, by hordes of elderly beings, both transient and otherwise, desperately hoping to make their journey to the afterlife. Unwilling to hear the pleas of the undead strangers and Traveler, the king is finally swayed by a heartrending encounter with the ailing Earth. While I won’t reveal the ending of the show in hopes that you will be intrigued enough to attend one of the final performances, I will say that the evening concludes with a procession of actors and audience in which all are invited to speak the names of their dead and to sing them a song of remembrance.
What makes this show so spectacular is not the merit of the performance or the eloquence of the script, but the communal nature of the production from conception to execution. Community volunteers work together to produce each element of the show, to perform it, and, in return, to receive it and then perform alongside the performers. We are all complicit. The community gives the players a space in which to play, clothing to wear, props to hold; the community steps into the limelight; the community responds by engaging in the performance. What a magical thing. Magical and spiritual in the way theater was at its inception. I’ve never seen another production accomplish this feat. And, in my opinion, there is no greater compliment I can give a performance. So, as a thank you to the folks at BareBones Productions, I offer a poem I wrote several years ago in an attempt to describe the type of theater they offered up this evening.
i need more than unity of action
they need more than place and time.
no more masterpieces,
mind-numbing slapstick
epic love themes, music, or mime
idea, mimic, love, sweep, heal
idea, mimic, love, sweep, heal
what happened to the ritual,
the ceremony of the thing?
aristotle said, “mimic,”
but all i feel is a deadly sting
Big!Bright!Fast!Loud!Big!Bright!Fast!Loud!
you weren’t born at epidaurus simply to make a buck –
money doesn’t matter in a healing place.
we need theater, performance, to celebrate our lives,
not to serve as a pedestal for another pretty face.
consensus, community, evidence, action
consensus, community, evidence, action
thespis stepped out of the chorus with an idea in his head:
consensus aside, all evidence to the contrary,
we need dialogue,
connection
communion and community
our people are starving for artistic interaction; let’s be sure they’re fed.
in the twenty-first century, we’ve forgotten our roots,
and have
forsaken them for Shakespeare in the park
Oh
dionysus, i beg you, in this dawn of a new era
sweep us up in a sea of true art.
Thank you, all, and happy Hallowe’en.
