The project we previously had on file, Old Paper Houses, is one that we have raised some funds for already through Fractured Atlas, and we will continue to raise funds in part for this project, as we conduct a final phase of revisions for it, and currently prepare for a presentation of it at the Prelude Festival at CUNY. We are now searching for opportunities for a longer run of this piece in its final form. We recently applied to grants in order to raise more money to be able to rent The Irondale Center in Fort Greene for a three weekend run. Irondale has offered to subsidize our rental, but we still need to raise money to be able to afford to produce this show there.
“Old Paper Houses” is a devised play that Piehole has been developing since 2013. It is based on the writing of Bernadette Mayer and historical documentation about Brook Farm, an 1840s utopian community. The project is comprised of a series of episodes in which a group strives for a life of meaning in New England. They being in a monotonous, exaggerated New England town in the winter, and move on to Brook Farm in the 1840s. Finally, they set out to create their own utopia using cardboard boxes, and a live feed camera. Eventually their attempt to find a communal, intentional life fails, until they all find themselves offstage in a 1970s Rec Room, which the audience views via live-feed camera. In this space, they are in a sort of post-utopian hang out session. AFter the show, the audience is invited to the 1970s room, where there will be different post-show events, such as musical acts and poetry readings.
We most recently performed a five performance run at The Connelly Theater in March 2014, and have been spending the month of September developing and refining the newest parts of the script, with the goal of cutting about thirty minutes from the piece. We now hope to mount it at Irondale, where we would tailor the piece to this historic space. In addition to our post-show events in the 1970s Room, we will work with Irondale's community engagement programs and create youth workshops, in which children will imagine their own utopia, create a diorama of this world, and then journey through it using a live-feed camera. Thus the expanded vision for the full production of Old Paper Houses involves expanding our utopian thinking out into the community, through workshops and other events.
In the meantime, Piehole is continuing to develop new work through our member and director Tara Ahmadinejad’s fellowship at the New York Theater Workshop. These projects are ones that we have begun to develop through other opportunities over the past two years. One is a piece that is inspired by an abandoned skip shop we encountered on a retreat in Vermont in July 2014. This space, which was designated as our rehearsal space, had been abandoned due to excessive flood damage from Hurricane Sandy and economic woes due to decreased skiing in Vermont (a result of the recession in 2008, as well as Climate Change). The space’s visible history inspired us to create a movement-based piece entitled Ski End, which we hope to continue to develop at NYTW.
Finally, Piehole is planning to develop and present an adaptation of a book entitled The Fizzles, created by Jasper Johns with prose by Samuel Beckett. Our plan is to present this in May or June 2015, and we are currently in conversation with Alec Duffy from the Brooklyn venue JACK about presenting it there. We created a version of this piece in 2012 and presented it for one night at Triple Canopy in Greenpoint. We had to turn so many people away from that single performance, and have decided to continue developing the piece and to remount it for a longer run. The Fizzles is a piece about failure and the inevitable destruction of the body, as well as the inexplicable human impulse to keep striving. This piece features projections, movement choreographed by Rebecca Warner, and live music by experimental musician Lea Bertucci.
I am applying for fiscal sponsorship through Fractured Atlas to allow Piehole to be able to raise funds for a range of projects. We are transitioning into a different model where we work on multiple projects per year, each in different stages of development, as opposed to devoting all of our time to one piece. We are increasingly expanding our community and connecting with venues that offer smaller-scale platforms for the presentation of work. Our aim is to continue making smaller-scale projects for shorter runs around the city, as we search for a longer run for the larger-scale Old Paper Houses. The only way to make this possible is through fiscal sponsorship of our artistic project of Piehole, which we envision as an artistic entity that fosters community, makes space for doubt, and hosts audiences through engaging, surprising, and impossible performances.
Funds raised through Fractured Atlas will cover physical production needs for each of our projects, in their different stages. At this stage in our work, we feel it is irresponsible to get into the habit of making artists work for free, and that paying artists is a necessary step toward societal appreciation of the value of artists. The time, dedication, and professionalism that each artist pours into the work – particularly work as demanding and time-consuming as this project – cannot go un-recognized. The funds that we intend to raise under the fiscal sponsorship of Fractured Atlas will also therefore be used to compensate our artists.
