Nabucco at the Minnesota Opera

It's that time of year again for visiting The Minnesota Opera with my cartoonist friends at the Black Hat Collective.

Armed with our pens, paper, pencils, and paintbrushes, we got to enjoy some fine performance while making ourselves useful by bringing you all cartoons from the theatre!

This month's show is NABUCCO by Giuseppe Verdi
(click here for tickets)

The opera tells the story of King Nabucco (Nebuchadnezzar) from the bible, and the staging uses a stage-within-a-stage setup to draw parallels between the Assyrian oppression of the Jews and the Austrian oppression of Italy in Verdi's time.

To learn more about the plot, the set, the history, and my watercolor cartoons, click "read more"

Blair Thomas - Hard Headed Heart

I got the chance to see the amazing Blair Thomas perform Hard Headed Heart at In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre. 

Heard Headed Heart is made up of three of the artist's solo pieces.

First, Mr. Thomas performed "The Puppet Show of Don Cristobal" which is a raunchy and violent throwback to Punch and Judy-style puppet shows.  He makes a lot of innovative choices in the technical and poetic front.  For example, he wears a façade/costume that can transform from one character to another with a single spin.

Second, he performs his interpretation of "Saint James Infirmary" —which features unique marionettes, a story scroll, and live jazz orchestration which Thomas provides as a one-man-band with the help of a loop pedal.

Come to The Medicine Show!

Ladies and gentlemen!  Boys and girls! 

The time has come for a reprise of 

the phantasmagorical, sensational, mystical 

Strombolli's Medicine Show!

Alchemy: Its history and theory

My friend Michael McConnell is designing a gallery exhibit about the periodic table of the elements.   I am a rabid Alchemy enthusiast, so Michael gave me a special assignment:  By Spring 2013 I shall create a 10 minute (or 10'x10'x10') presentation on the elements as understood by the Alchemists.  To prepare for the project I wrote this "thesis" to base my work around.  Here I shall take a "just the facts, Ma'am" approach to the history of Alchemy and focus mainly on what was pertinent to the periodic table.  Still, talking about Alchemy is not an exact science because Alchemy itself was not an exact science, but rather, a "philosophical art" for which each Alchemist had his own unique approach and theories about what he was doing.

The origin of Alchemy:

Hellenistic Egypt, ca 300 BC.  Greek colonists look at the religion of the Egyptians and see similarities between their god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth (The-Thrice-Great).  Both were gods of language, gods of magic and psychopomps (in charge of transmitting souls from one world to the next, like the grim reaper) In the minds of some, the two figures merge into one character called Hermes Trismegistus. 

Bare Bones Halloween Extravaganza.

I spent the 2 weekends prior to and including Halloween helping out with Bare Bones Puppets' Halloween Extravaganza,  "A Fistful of Dirt - How the Death was Won"

"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... 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... 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."

(From wearthegoldhat.wordpress.com)

Barebones can be described as "community theatre at its best."  It's certainly the most community-oriented production I've ever been involved with.  Hundreds of people came out to put on this show, and work was found for everybody.

images from the rehearsal of the show can be seen here

images from the full-on performance can be seen here

My job was to project psychedelic imagery onto a screen, using the same materials we used on Stromboli's Medicine Show

Happy Halloween :)

At Open Eye Figure Theatre - Puppet-Making and Joice Rejoice!

Open Eye Figure Theatre is a nationally recognized puppetry and theatre company in Minneapolis. They do pieces in a historic theatre space as well as in neighborhoods in the Twin Cities during a tour of area communities called the "Driveway Tour." The work there is always unique, exploring and experimenting with the magic of performing objects.

In the winter, I took some workshops at Open Eye, and I met Susan Haas and Michael Sommers, the artistic directors of the theatre.  After going to see a show there in June, Michael Sommers invited me out to help construct puppets for an upcoming show.

So, over the course of about two weeks in late July, I went out to Open Eye and helped the artistic directors build their puppet's heads out of papier mâché.  I also helped move items around the studio, painted stage components, and wired up a lighting fixture to illuminate the puppets.

Work-in-progress shot of what I helped on.

The puppet show we constructed is a Punch and Judy-style show to be interpolated into the larger show, Joice Rejoice, conceived and written by Kevin Kling, who is a well-loved playwright and storyteller and a frequent collaborator with Open-Eye.

Left to right:  The Devil, Michael Sommers, Sara Richardson,
Eric Jensen, Kevin Kling, Jacqueline Ultan 

Strombolli's Medicine Show

This March I've been helping out at In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre.
One of the things that I did there was I helped out with a show called "Strombolli's Medicine Show" created by Daniel Polnau.

It was a sort of weird variety show, cabaret, magic, circus, medicine show... thing.

This is the what the stage and backdrop looked like.  In the center is the cauldron that contains "the panacea to cure all the ills of humanity"

This is Dan as Dr. Strombolli - A zany medicine man who opens the gates to the spirit world to call forth a variety of strange creatures and acts to convince the audience of the existence of magic, and to ultimately fill the cauldron.

Here's MY part:  Backstage I worked at an overhead projector with artists Kate Saturday and Olli Johnson to create kaleidoscopic projections behind the action, using colored plates and gels.

One of the highlights of the show - an image that defies explanation.

The cast photo

We had lots of fun, that's me on the right.