Documents of the third Surreal Cabaret

The third Surreal Cabaret was presented at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, August 23 at the Seligmann Center for the Arts, 23 White Oak Drive in Sugar Loaf.

The program

1. Steve Roe performed Museum Piece, a monologue describing a bizarre museum treating the relationship of art to commerce, science, and violence.
Roe is founder of COPE, the Council of (Poetic) Experimentation, a performance group dedicated to performing classic and original multimedia experimental works. Roe was Associate Producer and acted in the prize-winning film Under Jakob's Ladder.

2. Jennifer Kraus did Mirror, mirror, mirror, mirror which through video, movement and voice searches for redeeming vulnerability behind the current "selfie" culture.
Kraus, a Warwick native, is a dance teacher and choreographer. She most recently worked at HERE Arts Center in NYC as an Assistant Director. She has formed a theatrical production company, HUGE CUP Productions, through which she develops original dance theater work.

3. Michael Sean Collins delivered Igor’s Revenge, or The Black Dog Takes Another Bite, a macabre surreal existential monologue representing a conversation between a man and his unconscious.
Collins is an actor, poet, magician, photographer and former 22-year resident of New York City. He has performed in television, film, theater, cafes, night clubs circuses and alternative performance venues across the United States and Canada.

4. Chloe Roe sang Aria, John Cage’s composition which requires a single performer to vocalize in five languages using ten vocal styles.
Roe is a professional actress and singer. She appears as the lead in the feature film Feral Child and as Francis in The Library. She is also a member of The Manhattan Girls Chorus. But most of all she likes to rock out with her band.

5. William Seaton enacted The Debate of Thaumastes and Panurge, a disputation conducted entirely in gestures.
Seaton conceived the Surreal Cabaret. He also produces the Poetry on the Loose Reading/Performance Series and teaches workshops at the Northeast Poetry Center’s College of Poetry.

6. ArtCrime with John Korchok provided opening and incidental music and performed a unique version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.
ArtCrime is a cell of committed aesthetic hackers devoted to the overthrow of musical expectations. Using jazz, classical, and rock idioms, we make music that is reminiscent of the future. We sleep in the daytime, we work in the nighttime. We might not ever get home.


The poster by David Horton

[I haven't succeeded in reproducing the excellent poster by David Horton. Blogger doesn't seem to like the pdf format. Perhaps it will appear here soon.]


The benediction by the Lama Swine Toil

Good evening and welcome to the Surreal Cabaret at the Seligmann Studio, the staging area for advanced artistic research in Orange County. I am the Lama Swine Toil, Surrealist Chaplain, midwife to your imaginative endeavors for the next few hours. Allow me to bestow the special benediction of the unordained and to share a few words of scripture.
I am bedazzled to gaze upon you and to behold radiant perfect Buddhas enjoying the endless unemployment of Eternity. But in this quantum universe we find ourselves like Schrödinger’s cat in two states at once. I see as well as Buddhas small caged and pacing beasts like those in the Humane Society, motherless, anxious, and feeling alien indeed. Suspended between these realities, I invite you to make of yourself tonight a young child with no responsibilities beyond observing and playing.
And now a few words from our scriptures. Remember always the rule of the Abbey of Theleme which existed never and always: “Do as thou wouldst.” In different words the rural Midwestern prophet Ezekiel Cole expressed the same timeless thought “If thou hast eyes, go thy way.” Allow me to conclude with the glad exclamations of Lord Buckley’s Nazz, “Oh great swingin’ flowers of the fields! And the Nazz say “Dig Infinity!”

Documents of the first Surreal Cabaret

1. the announcement
A Surreal Cabaret will be presented at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, December 2 [2011] at the Orange County Citizens Foundation, 23 White Oak Drive in Sugar Loaf. Admission is free. The event will feature a series of short acts with local artists in performance.
In tribute to Surrealist émigré Kurt Seligmann (on whose estate the Foundation’s offices are located) each work will contain elements influenced by Surrealism. Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism” maintains, “in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest.”
Acts may cross genres from poetry and drama to dance and music. The audience can expect conceptual play, experimentation, improvisation, and audience involvement.
The performances will be presented by the Lama Swine Toil. Participating artists are David Horton, Jennifer Kraus, Daniel Mack, Oliver Olive-Eyes, Steve Roe, Patricia Seaton, and William Seaton.
Surrealism Festival events will continue indefinitely.

2. the artists and their works
David Horton is an award-winning artist whose work is included in major museums and collections. To him “making art is like making magic.” He teaches at William Paterson University. His work was titled Culture is not your Friend.
Director, choreographer, and dancer Jennifer Kraus currently dances with Movita Dance Theatre. She is the artistic director of newly founded HUGE CUP Productions, a live arts production company. She honed her directing skills under director Kristin Martin of HERE Arts Center learning the craft of directing. Her piece was Beautiful Evening to Enjoy the Charm of Being Alive
Daniel Mack is best known for his rustic furniture and for the books he’s written on rustic building. But lately, his own work has turned more to the eccentric. Using river bark he collects in Newburgh, he carves female-like figures, called "anima". He is also making small collages in the style of the Surrealists. He performed acts of Fumage.
Oliver Olive-Eyes Folk-punk-rock-funk singer-songwriter Oliver Olive-Eyes brings his creative blend of wit, irony, and hormones to the stage. Typical themes range from pasta to politics, compassion to compulsion. Finding insight in the unexpected, discovering solace through music, laughing, and crying, Oliver's songs are an enriching journey both wholesome and low in polyunsaturated fat. He sang a tune about love disrupted by an extraterrestrial.
Steve Roe is founder of COPE (Council Of Poetic Experimentation), a performance group dedicated to performing classic and original multimedia experimental works. Steve was Associate Producer for the feature film Under Jakob's Ladder, which won best period piece at the Manhattan Film Festival in 2011. Steve played the role of Hans in the film. He presented Bern Porter’s The Last Acts of Saint Fuck You.
Patricia Seaton was a member of The First Majority, a women’s art collective in Berkeley in the 1970s where she exhibited her drawings, paintings, ceramics, and sculptural works. She was an art teacher in San Francisco, Nigeria, the Midwest and NYC before her long career as an art therapist in psychiatric hospitals. She provided intermittent encouragement and direction of audience response.
Poet, critic, and translator William Seaton has been active in performance and spoken words activities since the Happenings of the sixties. A central figure of the Cloud House group in San Francisco in the seventies, he has presented the Poetry on the Loose Reading/Performance Series in the Hudson Valley since 1993. He performed The Soap Opera of the Pair Who Forgot Themselves, But Only Temporarily.

3. welcoming words of the Lama Swine Toil
Good evening and welcome to the Surreal Cabaret. I am the Lama Swine Toil . You may feel pleased, even blessed, that fate has compelled you to this event. As for those of us on this side of the footlights, we deem ourselves impregnable, since, if you don’t like what we do, we can be pleased to have outraged the Philistines, whereas, if you like it, we will be recognized for the geniuses we are.
As we welcome you to the Cabaret, we welcome Orange County to a blinking recognition of that art has evolved since the opening of the twentieth century. In support of this continuing process, here in the headquarters of the OCCF, I look forward to an ever-brighter future when the indoor areas of the government building in Goshen will be abandoned and the courtyards and roofs given to neo-pagan practices and penny socials; when Woodbury Common will have reopened as a theater of dreams with twenty-five stages enacting fantasies and nightmares and nothing costs a single cent, even the popcorn is free; when tourists at West Point will gaze at rubble and old foundations and marvel at the river and at the unapologetic fierceness of war.
Enough crystal-gazing! Look now before your eyes! Prepare to see visions flash by in succession. Should one not please, it is likely to be the one you need. In any event, wait a few minutes and the next will arrive. You may if you please imagine yourselves gods observing the eons pass: our first little act, perhaps, the Hadean, then the Isuan and Swazian to the present. Or it may be that, with enough imaginative participation, this entire presentation will displace itself in the dream-like abyss of the future. You will know.
And when you depart, you will find that you view the world outside with the same acceptance you give to your dreams and, this evening, to the stage.