An Evening at Soulshine

 

 

     The event was produced on December 20, 2023 at the Soulshine Market in Pine Bush, New York by James Pogo.  Dan Andreana performed poetry scored like music stretching words to their limit with expressive variation in pitch, volume, and timbre.  Then James Pogo and his associate Kevin, performing as Flux Duo ++ passed out party hats and lay on their backs shirtless with lit candles in their navels while playing a little toy organ and leading the audience in “Happy Birthday.”  The third portion of the program was a set of simultaneous readings by me and Patricia.  The evening was concluded by Steve Roe who carefully set the stage, lighted it, and performed a moving song dedicated to the children of Gaza.

     Artist Tom Gargiulo, only just arrived from Florida, introduced the performers.

 

 

document 1:  a sample of Dan Andreana’s texts

 

Softly 1/8/19

 

nil ad sense a)voided

oh doze on the lid!

brat shines boldly

bodily in every nigh(t

hangar shut down

with doug fir sprigs

needling the crossing guard.

they sings the songs

and sonnets of tar

burnt under a frond

like paper clippings.

your’sis hours in t)his.

a gradient of wan

to wax above

the rippled sea

in a gully of sand.

she waits on the bar(d

expecting any moon

for the path(age

over the moss.

 

 

25#2 (2017)

 

S take urn

table lego BL

ox E blew shrill

tower over crow

D lighted my lift

on 47th teen strut

terd door from the Reich

a champion rains on

foul ingot morsels

stuck to frozen lip edge

G oughtta rat a tat

sir man on the muonty

red queer queen a miss

blacking out the middle

slight offended shuffle

T rye red shot guzzler

shooting from hip

corner pocket

got a rocket in?

lawn before the dawn

tossed out the water

grayer than black is white

just before going to work

she said why knot?

So we tied one on

 

 

 

document 2: William Seaton’s simultaneous readings

 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning/ Henry Miller

 

 

Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed

And worthy of acceptation.  Fire is bright,

Let temple burn, or flax; an equal light

Leaps in the flame from cedar-plank or weed:

And love is fire.  And when I say at need

I love thee . . . mark! . . . I love thee—in thy sight

I stand transfigured, glorified aright,

With conscience of the new rays that proceed

Out of my face toward thine.  There’s nothing low

In love, when love the lowest: meanest creatures

Who love God, God accepts while loving so.

And what I feel, across the inferior features

Of what I am, doth flash itself, and show

How that great work of Love enhances Nature’s.

 

 

Sauntering along the boulevard I had noticed her verging toward me with that curious trot-about air of a whore and the run-down heels and cheap jewelry and the pasty look of their kind which the rouge only accentuates. It was not difficult to come to terms with her. We sat in the back of the little tabac called L’Elephant and talked it over quickly. In a few minutes we were in a five franc room on the Rue Amelot, the curtains drawn and the covers thrown back. She didn’t rush things, Germaine. She sat on the bidet soaping herself and talked to me pleasantly about this and that; she liked the knickerbockers I was wearing. Tres chic! she thought. They were once, but I had worn the seat out of them; fortunately the jacket covered my ass. As she stood up to dry herself, still talking to me pleasantly, suddenly she dropped the towel and, advancing toward me leisurely, she commenced rubbing her pussy affectionately, stroking it with her two hands, caressing it, patting it, patting it.

 

 

Nicene Creed/deSade

 

I believe in one God, The Father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, Of all things visible and invisible. I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, The Only Begotten Son of God, Born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, True God from true God, Begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; Through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation He came down from heaven, And by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, And became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, He suffered death and was buried, And rose again on the third day In accordance with the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven And is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory To judge the living and the dead And his kingdom will have no end. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, Who proceeds from the Father [and the Son], Who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, Who has spoken through the prophets. I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins And I look forward to the resurrection of the dead And the life of the world to come. Amen.

 

The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind. To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell. There is no stupidity religions have omitted to revere; and you know just as well as I, my friends, that when one examines a human institution, the first thing one must do is discard all religious notions. They are poison to lucidity. Let nobody doubt that religions are the cradles of despotism. The first of all despots was a priest; the first king and the first emperor of Rome, Numa and Augustus, both allied themselves with the priesthood; Constantine and Clovis were abbots rather than sovereigns; Heliopolis was the priest of the sun. In all times, in all centuries, despotism and religion have been so thoroughly interconnected that, as is easily demonstrated, in destroying one you undermine the other, for the profound reason that each will help the other to gain power.

 

 

Hitler/Marx & Engels

 

Aryan tribes, often almost ridiculously small in number, subjugated foreign peoples and, stimulated by the conditions of life which their new country offered them (fertility, the nature of the climate, etc.), and profiting also by the abundance of manual labour furnished them by the inferior race, they developed intellectual and organizing faculties which had hitherto been dormant in these conquering tribes. Within the course of a few thousand years, or even centuries, they gave life to cultures whose primitive traits completely corresponded to the character of the founders, though modified by adaptation to the peculiarities of the soil and the characteristics of the subjugated people. But finally the conquering race offended against the principles which they first had observed, namely, the maintenance of their racial stock unmixed, and they began to intermingle with the subjugated people. Thus they put an end to their own separate existence; for the original sin committed in Paradise has always been followed by the expulsion of the guilty parties.

 

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.  Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.  Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

 

document 3: the Flux Duo ++

 

document 4: Steve Roe’s song

 

“Blue”

 

Intro (spoken): “it is said that our understanding of happiness comes from the experiences of our childhood.”

 

Hold up sign “blue.”

 

Hold up sign “for the children of Gaza.”

 

Sung:

 “keep things simple, my love, and look at the sky….. it’s blue”

“Sit by my side, my love, and stare at the sea…. It’s blue.”

Keep your heart true, my love, for we are all born to die…. It’s blue.”

The Hip Aesthetic of the Invisible Circus

 

     The three-day event produced by the Diggers and the Artists Liberation Front in Glide Church during February of 1967 titled Invisible Circus is significant in the evolution of performance art, but rarely discussed in histories that stress the New York City scene.  While East Coast artists like Allan Kaprow, Joseph Beuys, Carolee Schneemann, and Robert Whitman were making a stir in locations like the Rueben and Smolin Galleries, hip San Francisco artists were devising events that embodied distinctly West Coast artistic values.  Among these were a distaste for celebrity and a democratic vision quite at odds with the ambitions of most artists, avant-garde or mainstream.  Through the Artists Liberation Front and the Diggers’ Communications Company, Chester Anderson, Claude Hayward, and others produced truly novel and radical works of art.  The fact that the artists’ names and their most significant works are virtually forgotten in art history is perhaps appropriate.

      The New York performance art scene developed first, its roots in the European trends of Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism.  From Ubu Roi through Artaud and the Theater of the Absurd, modern plays remained conventional in the most fundamental ways with scripts, actors, and spectators.  While the evenings at the Cabaret Voltaire may have seemed altogether chaotic to the audiences, they were planned in detail apart from spontaneous eruptions from the audience and the occasional police raid.  Artists and viewers might become boisterous with cat-calls, boos, and shouted challenges, but the evening, however far out, remained recognizably theater.

     Likewise, for a show often cited as the first “happening,” Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) at the Rueben Gallery those who attended received detailed instructions on what they should do, when they should move, and the like.  A bell punctuated the movement from each of six sets of three simultaneous happenings. The following year the same gallery presented Robert Whitman’s American Moon for which viewers entered an immersive environment and viewed the event from partial tunnels while performers, including Whitman and Simone Forti flashed lights, produced loud noises, and projected films.  At the conclusion Lucas Samaras sat in a swing above the spectators.  The entire proceeding was “carefully conceived and tightly scripted” to create “an interactive environment that manipulated the audience to a degree virtually unprecedented in 20th century art.” [1]     The limits of innovation in these early happenings are clear.

     A more radical program is explicit in the Fluxus group.  The 1963 manifesto by George Maciunas proclaims itself “REVOLUTIONARY” and advocates “living art, anti-art,” “NON ART REALITY, to be fully grasped by all people, not only critics, dilettantes, and professionals.”  Fluxus demands a fusion of “the cadres of political, social, & cultural revolutionaries into united front and action.” 

     What this might mean in practice is suggested by Maciunas in his “Manifesto on Art / Fluxus Art Amusement” (1965).  He stresses a democratic theme, insisting that, “art-amusement must be simple, amusing, unpretentious, concerned with insignificances, require no skill or countless rehearsals, have no commodity or institutional value.  The value of art-amusement must be lowered by making it unlimited, massproduced, obtainable by all and eventually produced by all.  Fluxus art-amusement is the rear-guard without any pretention or urge to participate in the competition of ‘oneupmanship’ with the avant-garde. It strives for the monostructural and nontheatrical qualities of simple natural event, a game or a gag. It is the fusion of Spikes Jones Vaudeville, gag, children's games and Duchamp.”

     While this program sounds quite revolutionary, it is largely imaginary.  Fluxus was in reality, of course, anything but unpretentious, simple, or natural, and its audience was anything but a general one.    Still, for all that, the events associated with its members remained in many ways highly conventional.  The 1961 Chambers Street loft concerts produced by Yoko Ono and La Monte Young in 1961 observed ordinary concert proprieties, with a clear distinction between onlookers and participants, credited composers, and intermissions, though some involved mixed media and some aleatory elements.  The 1963 Yam Festival devised by George Brecht and Robert Watts was novel in its locations, outside of art galleries, in its element of absurdity, and in its use of mail art, but retained the distinction between creators and consumers.  Never did the group stir outside these boundaries.

    On the other hand, in San Francisco, the epicenter of the ‘sixties youth rebellion, certain events, such as the Invisible Circus were produced that challenged expectations anew and constituted a revolution within the avant-garde itself.  Several activities had indeed been planned, often designed more to stimulate reactions than as an end in themselves.  For instance, the Communications Company brought the Gestetner printer they used for their broadsheets in an activity Richard Brautigan called the “John Dillinger Computer,” but its use was unforeseeable -- they were prepared to print anything for anybody.  Even the projects of insiders were improvisatory.  Chester Anderson went next door to a tavern where he overheard an animated discussion whereupon hie returned to the church, transcribed some of their remarks, printed a few pages and returned to show the bemused drinkers their words on paper. 

     A few pranks were programmed.  For instance, what was presented as a panel discussion on pornography to which a police officer had been invited was really a set-up.  When the police officer began to speak, he was unaware that, on the wall behind him, a penis had emerged through a hole and waggled about while the representative of the straight life was unaware of the cause of the audience’s excited amusement. 

     Though the Circus was punctuated by such moments of pre-planned if playful theater and music including appearances by Pig Pen, Janis Joplin and others, its central importance lies in what was wholly unplanned, what happened that was utterly forgotten as it involved no memoirists or big names in general.  What happened there is gone, something new is happening today.  The pertinent data’s having vanished is in fact the evidence for its authenticity.  Like sand paintings or archaic ritual, the point is in the action as it occurs, not in seeking to fix and retain it like a butterfly specimen in an album.

     While identifiable as a specifically hip aesthetic, the attitude implied by Dave Hodges’ poster was far from universal during the youth rebellion of the ‘sixties.  The “acid tests” of 1965-6 produced by Ken Kesey and Merry Pranksters such as Lee Quarnstrom and Neal Cassady with the aid of Owsley Stanley’s refreshments were very like parties featuring bands such as the pre-Grateful Dead Warlocks and light shows and appearances by Allen Ginsberg and other celebrities prominently featured on the posters.  The same pattern is evident for the Trips Festival at the Longshoremen’s Hall for January 21-23, 1966 organized by Bill Graham, Stewart Brand, Ramon Sender, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.  Similarly, publicity for the iconic event of the Haight-Ashbury era, the Human Be-In in 1967, resembled a routine concert announcement, lacking even psychedelic graphics.  Emmet Grogan specifically declared the intentions of the producers of the Invisible Circus to reveal “the feebleness of most public gatherings,” and to transform participants from “passive listeners” into “active participants.” [2]

      Though the Invisible Circus has been the focus here, the contrast between hip concepts and practices between the East and West coasts is, in fact, generally applicable, though hardly predictive in any individual case.  On the Pacific artists dared to defy the age-old artist’s ambition (so evident in Van Gogh’s letters) to be known, to sell.  Among the supporting examples that come first to mind are the scrupulous avoidance of individual celebrity in all Communications Company publications.  Authors are not mentioned, even names like Brautigan’s verging on fame; there is no “star” apart from the collective.  On the international level they had affinities with the Situationists. 

     The career of the Cockettes reinforces the point.   Originally an open door, anything-goes troupe founded by Hibiscus (George Edgerly Harris III) who lived with his company in the Friends of Perfection Commune, called the KaliFlower Commune.  They had welcomed men and women, gay and straight, gifted and untalented alike, and the shows were largely spontaneous.  The Cockettes met their end when their increasing popularity led to engagements in New York City where they were panned by critics who did not understand their anti-aesthetic aesthetic.  This did not, however, bring about their demise.   Rather, it was the lure of real celebrity and the financial rewards it implies, resisted by the idealistic communards that led to the end of the Cockettes and the spawning of the Angels of Light.

      Patty Smith’s Just Kids details an avant-garde scene just a few years later, illustrating a thoroughly East Coast goals.  The author and Robert Mapplethorpe were set on fame, always alert for any opening to a gallery, a dealer, or a wealthy collector.  Her depictions of their regular attendance at Max’s Kansas City, ever seeking to inch a bit closer to the Warhol table (though the maestro was not himself there) are richly comic and worlds away from the ethos I myself experienced reading poetry in the streets of San Francisco around the same time.   My broadsheets, like those of the Communications Company, had no attribution.  The conventionally over-sized artist’s ego was not considered hip. 

     The Diggers’ Invisible Circus broke new ground for the avant-garde by renouncing the illusion of the artist’s separateness and ownership of the work, embracing those in attendance as creators of what happens, a fact in any event.  Specific occurrences at the Invisible Circus were quite unpredictable, in a way impermissible even in works employing the aleatory devices associated with John Cage and Jackson MacLow.  The Diggers not only opened the door of the gallery; they did away with the gallery altogether, placing art in the context of everyday life and allowing its motive to be neither more nor less than fun.  While this ethos failed to move the centers of the art world, it did influence the margins, such as the activities at political demonstrations as well as Cloud House events, Burning Man, and Rainbow Gatherings.  Much remains to be done to understand the artistic implications of the hip movement in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury scene.

 

 

 

1.  Paul Schimmel, “Leap into the Void: Performance and the Object,” Out of Actions: between performance and the object, 1949–1979, MoCA Los Angeles, New York/London, 1998, pp.61-2.

2.  Ringolevio, 282.

Documents of the Fifth Surreal Cabaret

1. press release (in fact acts numbered 2 and 8-11 did not appear due to snowfall the day of the event)


Surreal Cabaret in Sugar Loaf – One Night Only!

The fifth Surreal Cabaret will be presented at 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, January 3 at the Seligmann Studio, 23 White Oak Drive in Sugar Loaf. Admission is free. The event will feature a series of short performances by local artists produced by Steve Roe with the assistance of William Seaton.

Acts may cross genres, mixing poetry, drama, dance, and music, while featuring conceptual play, experimentation, and improvisation. Several projection screens will provide a variety of visual stimulation in an environment of new word patterns, sounds never heard before, and suggestive theatrical gestures.

The event is part of an ongoing series of exhibits, readings, lectures, and workshops presented by the Seligmann Center for the Arts. Kurt Seligmann was a Surrealist artist who lived in Sugar Loaf, and the Center offers a rare Hudson Valley venue for avant-garde painters, writers, and performers.

This particular show, titled “On Thin Ice,” will memorialize Seligmann’s death from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, deemed to be accidental, on January 2, 1962. The extraordinary program, involving a wide circle of performance artists in the region, is detailed below.

For further information contact William Seaton at seaton@frontiernet.net or Steve Roe at sroe33@optonline.net . See www.kurtseligmann.org for details on other programs.

1. The program opens with a benediction from Surrealist chaplain Lama Swine Toil.
2. The Surreal Cabaret house band Mr. Sexy and the Hot Chicks warms up the audience.
3. “Lamp,” inspired by 1964 lamp subculture and other new wave consumerism is staged.
4. Spreaders offers “SoftError\\\drenched electronics::: damaged cassette loop junk media disruptions.”
5. “Dada Frolic” features Dan & Detta Andreana- speaking in their native tongue (Jibberish) and making sound art on the Bow Box and The Micasonic String Board.
6. William Seaton and the voice of Patricia Seaton alert the audience to “The Metaphysics of Everyday Life.”
7. Steve Roe performs “I Am Strange,” a work inspired by the work of Sun Ra.
8. The New York Pop Conceptualists, featuring Julie Mejia on bass, synthesizer, and vocals and Matt Luczak on drums, create “a response to the event itself.”
9. “Caution Horses,” from Jeffery Justin Van Dunk, is an experimental audio visual performance.
10. Jonas Bers offers an “abstract audiovisual improvisation using handmade electronics and modified consumer equipment to produce projected images and corresponding sound.”
11. The “23rd Toad Psalm” by the Orchestra de Fou, a long standing noise orchestra led by Dr. George Omara, with the assistance of members of Ohms of Resistance and Council of (Poetic) Experimentation will close out the evening.
For further information contact Steve Roe at sroe33@optonline.net or William Seaton at seaton@frontiernet.net. See www.kurtseligmann.org for details on other programs.


2. posters by Steve Roe

3. The Lineage of the Lama Swine Toil

I am the Lama Swine Toil and, like each of you, though singular, I am not alone.

I knew the divine madman Gundam Raul who played with Vishnu in the temple babbling and sticking his fingers in the statue’s mouth: “he’ll bite, he won’t bite, he’ll laugh, no he won’t, he’ll talk, but be silent”

And my neighbor next door is that Christ of the Gospel of Thomas who warned that buyers and merchants could not enter the kingdom and said to dance naked and unashamed, trampling on one’s clothes once and for all.

I am descended from Shi de, whose janitor’s broom swept his own mind clean, wiser than all the learned monks at the Guoqing Temple

And the illiterate Huineng who was delivering firewood when enlightened and who stole away in the night to avoid the envious when he was named Sixth Patriarch

I am at one with Muhammed who cut the sleeve of his robe to avoid disturbing his dear cat Muezza who slept and later the cat bowed to him in thanks as my own latter day cats have been known to do.

I revere the memory of the great Ji Gong who crazy and drunk was expelled from his monastery and thereafter practiced compassion in wine shops and low dives up and down the dusty streets crowded with suffering souls.

And in France my brother, the tumbler of Our Lady outshone the learned monks when he leaped and danced in love before the altar and heaven’s queen found his offering most sweet.

Not a hair’s breadth separates me from Johannes Tauler who knew Mechthild’s Flowing Light and knew as prophets and physicists alike will say that all without exception returns in the end to the source.

I am cousin, so I think, to Zhuang Zi who preferred his “filthy ditch” to the sovereign’s court and said, “I have determined never to take office, but prefer the enjoyment of my own free will."

I would scratch Diogenes that dog upon his hoary head, Diogenes who when he saw the shepherd boy drink from his own hand, then tossed away his begging bowl and said, “Fool that I am, to have been carrying superfluous baggage all this time.”

I strain my ears to hear the strain that came one night to that most annoying lady Margery Kempe as she lay with her husband in bed and “herd a sownd of melodye so swet and delectable, hir thowt, as sche had ben in paradyse.”

I think of dear Ikkyu who was brilliant with his flute entered brothels in his monastic robes and insisted his time with pavilion girls deepened his enlightenment.

I am as one with Hakuin Ekaku who, when asked about the afterlife, said, “Why should I know?” and when the questioner cried out, “You are a great teacher!” replied, “Yes, but not a dead one.”

Xuefeng Yicun tells all we need to know: “The Buddha is a bull-headed jail-keeper and the Patriarchs are horse-faced old maids!”



4. a further fit of "The Metaphysics of Everyday Life"

And a birth releases widening waves rolling fugue-like in four dimensions or more throughout fields known and fields awaiting a viewer and further yet where sight is unnecessary altogether;

For a death as well makes waves of an inverse character but no less graceful and potent, and were some gifted eyes to view from time’s back end they would see the end as the start spelled backwards, though the symmetry escapes us now,

And just as the truth of a birth is concealed behind jubilation that, in spite of mortality, we are keeping abreast of the game through efforts strenuous and strongly felt through the entire human race,

So the truth of a death is folded in self-pity and vain attempt to grasp at the straws that felt the summer sun so many years ago and, though we knew this moment was coming, we were nonetheless hard hit.

And we wept not for the departed but for ourselves, and not for our loss and raw loneliness torn open but as well for our own death lurking in a distant hallway awaiting most patiently our approach ever closer past the dusty doors of abandoned offices until we come upon it all at once.

For to be immortal would be like being of infinite height and would surely prove an inconvenience and hardly a thing to be wished for though it is true that one’s finiteness does not always seem to fit even after squirming and stretching!

And great flares of transformation arise and stars pass out of existence in the blooms of supernovae and think quiet afterthoughts of cosmic rays, world without end,

For there is always a further readjustment to be sought whether in the passing of stormy galactic clouds or some sac of eggs suspended in swampy water, restless and wriggling, or patterns of pencil marks on paper, and things never come wholly to rest.

And what Socrates called wind-eggs may not be without value in the end, for the church and the film industry and indeed all the advertisers likewise trade in images, and enjoy good custom indeed, though poets may go begging.

For liberation as well as manacles must be mind-forged, though the meadow breeze in one’s hair is none the less palpable for that, nor the dizzying sight from the peak, and we must be glad of our bargains and catch them where we may.

And the sum of all things is precisely nothing at all, when positive charges meet negative and matter meets antimatter and finds annihilation perfect and sweet and a most elegant end,

For we can only think that the primary concerns of the kosmos are aesthetic in spite of baryon asymmetry and other pebbles of ignorance that cramp our walk and give us blisters;

And Kurt Seligmann has gone off to join the many, for a single slip on a January morning may overpower a legion of intentions and halt the burgeoning of a host of futures each full of fresh promise,

For like him it is all we can do to pursue the vermin that annoy and the nightmares that trouble our sleep and the furtive darting threats that circle about seeking to gain advantage in this imperfect light.

And we can only breathe together and think of him and gaze each other in the eye and know we walk also a path that can only end in drama and alarm.

For the pot will continue to boil and sometimes to boil over and sometimes to simmer and in it the currents are drifting describing lovely patterns that never repeat and the dance cannot come to rest and in this it is like feet when the music plays.

Documents of the fourth Surreal Cabaret

1. the announcement

Fourth Surreal Cabaret at the Seligmann Center
The fourth Surreal Cabaret, featuring performance art, multi-media, and other avant-garde techniques will be presented at 7:30 on Friday, June 13 in the Kurt Seligmann Studio, 23 White Oak Drive, Sugar Loaf. The event is free and open to the public.

The program will open as usual with a benediction from the Surrealist chaplain, the Lama Swine Toil. Music will be provided by the New Jersey experimental ensemble ArtCrime. Acts include a rap by Anne Hanson, the Council of (Poetic) Experimentation doing “Genet Discordia,” William Seaton’s “Party,” and Susanna Rich singing two songs from her one-woman musical Shakespeare’s *itches: the Musical.

The Cabarets provide a rare opportunity for Hudson Valley residents to see exciting new work by area artists using cutting edge practices. “We pay tribute to Surrealist Kurt Seligmann in a way I suspect he would have approved – by showcasing new vision.” says producer William Seaton.

As in the past artist David Horton has created a poster for the Cabaret.


2. the program

Lama Swine Toil "Benediction"
The Surrealist chaplain will seek to save the lost and to convince the saved to lose themselves.

CO(P)E "Genet Discordia/Bird of Paradise"
Featuring Steve Roe’s voice, Dan Andreana’s video, Al Margolis, Kevin Geraghty, and Detta Andreana on sound. The Council of (Poetic) Experimentation is an art collective dedicated to the performance and publication of experimental works. Their most recent publication is War Stories.

Anne Hanson "The Panther and the Butterfly"
A poem transformed into a rap, sort of falling between the two. Anne Hanson is known to Hudson Valley audiences as a poet and storyteller.

William Seaton "Party"
Unspoken conversations, the subterranean levels of a social gathering, find utterance. Actors are Ingrid King, Jim Kenny, & Patricia Seaton. William Seaton is the producer of the Surreal Cabarets. He maintains a blog at williamseaton.blogspot.com.

Susanna Rich "Nicole's Song"
This song from the one-woman show Shakespeare’s *itches marks the twentieth anniversary of Nicole Brown Simpson's death.

"Kate Explains"
Also from Shakespeare’s *itches, Kate the Shrew as a contemporary bartender. For more information on Susanna Rich’s performances, books, and other activities see susannarich.com or wildnightsproductions.com.

ArtCrime Music
John Korchok, Steve Orbach, and Bob Siebert perform as ArtCrime, New Jersey’s outstanding experimental ensemble. With backgrounds in jazz, rock, and experimental music, the instrumentalists of ArtCrime create entirely new, often improvisatory music. See http://www.art-crime.net/.


3. the poster by David Horton

4. the words of the Lama Swine Toil

The Parable of the not-OK Corral
He walked the dusty, sun-baked streets of a town
on the far frontier of metaphysics.
His faithful Indian companion whispered sutras in his ear.
The townspeople hustled off to shelter behind the nearest received ideas.
The tumbleweeds blew, and the buzzards cried out wise suggestions ,
but he never heard and just stared straight ahead.
At the street’s opposite end, walking slowly toward him, was his enemy,
his brother, his mirror-image.
(And the town’s pretty schoolmarm walked an identical street
at that very moment, facing a Doppelgänger of her own,
her foot like his poised seeking the next step,
and neither could help it at all.)
The sweat dripped down his cheek.
The Avidya Boys, he knew, were crouching in doorways,
leaning from second-story windows,
and the gang from the Hungry Ghost Ranch,
covered him from every angle.
The clock ticked on toward the highest of high noons
when time, that old codger, will expire, as did Gabby Hayes in 1969.
Suddenly he heard from behind the voice of the kosmos, deep and unmistakable,
“Drop your ego on the ground right there, I’ve got you covered. “
And he knew the jig was finally up.

5. Party

To be performed by four actors, dispersed throughout the room. The lights should be out as the monologues are unspoken. Art the Cabaret performance, the audience was told they might close their eyes.

Party
I.
1st speaker: How can it be that everyone is talking to someone with the sole exception of me. I can hardly continue staring at the book titles much longer. Oh, how to assume an insouciant air as I sit outside the gate, listening to the self-satisfied buzz of all the drones? I sit discomfited on rocks, so harsh a seat alone, a tragic pariah, unrecognized, unappreciated, like the finest of apples, too high on the tree, pecked by mindless birds, exposed to wind and rain and merciless fate. The fallen apple is more fortunate, its crisis past, the quick hurtle to meet earth over.

2nd speaker: All is well just now. I think. My dyspepsia has subsided, my portfolio has gained twenty percent this year and yet I haven’t gained more than ten percent in weight. Last time I saw my doctor he said he saw no problems, but that was two weeks ago and I failed to point out that weird blemish in my armpit which online research has indicated could be the sign of any number of serious conditions. Then, too, even darker possibilities may lurk in the bushes, ready to leap like a fierce and mocking panther. My balance sheet will be powerless then. My successful lawsuit will mean nothing. I can only imagine the leap of the predator who is surely there,, the sudden sharp full-body alarm. I can only imagine it again and again until the thought is worse than the reality.

3rd speaker: Oh, god, I haven’t the slightest idea what she has been saying for the past five minutes. It looks like I’m cued to respond. I have perhaps two seconds to devise the best strategy. I am on the edge of a high cliff and I see the rocks below. Vertigo seizes me. Oh, that I might buzz like a fly to the further reaches of the room. Lord, lord, what does that look mean? I am pinned in an album, classified and dessicated, without recourse, but perhaps that is only right. This day, another damp and ruined space of time, to be discarded like a used tissue, capable of inspiring only disgust.

4th speaker: light in room’s corner, groan of outside autos, tremor in the skull, graceful neck flesh incline curve of thigh shaking of a comely arm eruption of energies heading toward a brick wall hurtling on to whammo collision dizzy soft knee whew take a long breath wine rises to brain already fogged by error confusion and willful refusal to see to feel to ----? Buzz of anger yesterday at the bus stop what was the look about? Tomorrow the dentist.

1st speaker: Indeed, I am out of my element. When I lived in California, ah, all was palmy. I flourished in the sun, but here its heat is rude and pushy. These people all think just alike. They grow here rooted to the soil like barnacles to their rock. When will someone ask the question that will free my soul and let it rise and flourish and sing? I am the genie, locked still inside the lamp, pinched by unfair circumstance, awaiting the magic word. I hear the confident rumble of everyone else’s words knowing that my own alone would be garbled and meaningless as though run backwards. My silence is finally my preference.

2nd speaker: O might one feel secure in a grand and hilltop mansion? Or would I then attract lightning, jealousy, angry mobs perhaps? My position is a lofty one, but I gained it through deceit, I maintain it by impersonating a success. The strain is mounting. How can I continue the fraud another day? Another hour? Many eyes see through me, they slyly predict my downfall, indeed perhaps they can cause it. I’m propped up only by my reluctance to let the jackals lick my bones. Yet they advance steadily with sharp intentions in their eyes. I shall take refuge in the toilet. Perhaps it’s time to exit before my stride will be even less graceful than now.

3rd speaker: If only time could pause a moment I might regain my composure, but the ground slips from beneath my feet ever so slightly. I need only a chance to catch up, to rest a moment, to seize time and hold it by the throat and shake it until it gives me what I must have. I could then be master, I could flourish, yet here I am, condemned to run two seconds behind, always regarding my movie with a detached and critical eye and always writing later a most brilliant review which will never see the light of day.

4th speaker: Twinge of envy I am a barely balanced funambulist with no rest on the high tension line buzzing with power, the birds on either side skip and dance, the sun blazes with certainty and power, the other people are far away, all security systems on high alert these past few years, avoid feedback, prick of lust, flash of pale skin, twitter of neural dendrites leap every synapse whee whee mememememememe eeeee

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!”

Surreal Cabaret 2

1. press release

A Surreal Cabaret will be presented at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, May 25 at the Orange County Citizens Foundation, 23 White Oak Drive in Sugar Loaf. Admission is free. The event, produced by David Horton and William Seaton as part of an ongoing Surrealism Festival, will feature a series of short acts with local artists in performance. Refreshments will be available and admission is by donation.
Like the first Surreal Cabaret last December, this event is a tribute to Surrealist émigré Kurt Seligmann (on whose estate the event will be staged) each work will contain elements influenced by Surrealism. Acts may cross genres from poetry and drama to dance and music. The audience can expect conceptual play, experimentation, improvisation, and audience involvement.
Producers of acts include James Antonie, Michael Sean Collins, Kevin Geraghty, Janet Hamill, David Horton, Steve Roe, William Seaton, and John Toth. Further details are below.
Surrealism Festival events will continue at least through next fall. A show of contemporary collage curated by Jonathan Talbot and Jessica Lawrence is currently on exhibit. Upcoming events include a film screening with director Jacob Burckhardt on April 27, a dining event with pasta made on Seligmann’s etching press in July, and a poetry workshop with Janet Hamill in September. In addition, next fall an exhibit will open featuring Seligmann’s own work and rare photographs documenting Surrealism in Orange County.
The series is produced by the Seligmann Center for the Arts at the Seligmann Homestead with the cooperation of Orange County Citizens Foundation.
Further information is available from William Seaton at seaton@frontiernet.net or David Horton at doctortinker@gmail.com.

2. invocation by the Lama Swine Toil

I am pleased to see that you have returned for a dose of our salutary spring tonic. Open wide – your eyes, your ears, and your mind. In preparation for our setting out for unknown realms, at once so distant and as close as each of our skulls, I shall invoke the ancient goddess called by many names whom artists know as that most fickle beloved, the Muse.

-- May she come among us this evening and every evening.
-- May she awaken our soul like a new Rip Van Winkle, wandered back to town again but this time to find that everyone else has been asleep and only he awake and thus he is little understood!
-- May she bring order to those parts of our minds that are disordered while, at the same time disordering the orderly!
-- May she stir our hearts to small leaps and bounds like goats in a field running nowhere!
-- May we feel her texture like most intimate moss, like quizzical tomato leaf, like the orderly asphalt, like cleverest rabbit fur, like thoughts yet unthought . . .
-- May our work tend always toward the enlightenment of all sentient beings!

The vision passes from world to artist to work to you, the saving remnant, o practitioners of sensibility, and what you will do with it will make tomorrow.

3. Featured artists:
After opening words by Surrealist chaplain, the Lama Swine Toil, William Seaton will read his “adult nursery rhymes” before a background of projected images.
Next Janet Hamill performs her surreally inspired poetry to the ambient drone rock and roll of Lost Ceilings featuring Bob Torsello, Mark McNutt, and Greg Feller.
Then Steve Roe presents an excerpt from and variation on Robert Ashley’s opera That Morning Thing performed and adapted by COPE (Council of Poetic Experimentation) for voice, dance, musicians. Al Margolis (of Pogus Productions) has agreed to perform as musician. The excerpt deals with the relationship between the rational and its opposite. A description of a strange erotic encounter is described while a dancer performs to live music.
Kevin Geraghty will next present The Conference, a brief theater piece in which he, Larry Portner, and Steve Roe portray businessmen engaged in a most curious non-verbal conference.
James Antonie, known for the University of Utopian Determinants and the Micro-Gallery, will then perform The Alchemist showing the process of transformation and the discovery of the philosophers’ stone.
The Four Grape Theory of Human Functioning will be explained by Dr. Thelonious Tinker with an introduction by David Horton. There will be a live demonstration of Dr. Tinker’s Creation Vibration Booster.
Michael Sean Collins will perform a surreal theatrical poetic narrative of the absurdly macabre.
Finally John Toth will present The Nurse's Back: Apparitions on a Landscape, a work Holly Fairbank (choreographer/dancer) and John Toth (sculptor/digital artist) collaborate on a performance-installation piece inspired by Salvador Dali. Using fabric as pages of a life-size “book” to create places for video and photography projection, Fairbank has opportunity to interplay with her own image as well as other images to examine an interior mind-scape much as Salvador Dali alluded to in many of his surrealist paintings. Various sections of the piece can be viewed at www.johntoth.net/dali/nurses_back.htm.

4. poster by David Horton

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.