"Every
place is given its character by certain patterns
of events that keep on happening there."
~ Christopher Alexander, The
Timeless Way of Building
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The
start of 2017 found us lost in the woods outside
of Zvonece, Croatia, chasing after a troupe of
mace-wielding, sheepskin-clad men decked in
heavy bronze bells and flowered headdresses. As
guests of the Kamov Artists Residency in Rijeka,
we were invited to follow the centuries-old Zvončari
processions, which travel during Carnival season
along traditional herding routes from village to
village. En route, the Zvončari perform
cascading full-body collisions to create a
mesmerizing soundscape of bells, audible for
miles. Their chaotic clamoring belies the
precise choreography and layered iconography of
a performance that recalls a lost pastoral
identity, evokes historical struggles, and
preserves fertility rites linked to
“Wildman” traditions throughout Europe. Over
the years, through Balkan wars, political
repression, and rapid urbanization, this yearly
village tradition has managed not only to
survive, but also evolve, carrying traces of
every epoch left subtly embedded in its costumes
and performance.
As Processional Arts Workshop begins its 10th
year as a non-profit, the Zvončari affirm
for us how annual processions can serve as
vessels for fragile, local narratives. Recurring
processions allow communities to take stock, to
weave new stories year after year, from the same
continuous thread. Compared to the long tenure
of the Zvončari, PAW ‘s first decade
seems humblingly brief, yet in that time we have
seeded or cultivated ongoing procession
traditions in over a dozen communities. |
In
2017 alone, PAW partnered with Harlem community
gardens to help guide our 6th year of Morningside
Lights. We added ghostly riders to the Oyster
Bay’s Halloween Parade, which we helped
launch last year. We returned to Miami’s
Vizcaya Museum for our 2nd
annual immersive performance. We sparked the 1st
Annual Legends
and Spies Procession in
Stony Brook, NY with giant historical effigies.
And as always we returned to our roots, building
a monumental Cabinet of Curiosities for the 44th
Annual Halloween Parade, and continuing to
develop the Midsummer
Pageant in the Italian
Alps we began 15 years ago. A busy year
culminated with life-sized elephants anchoring
the 10th
Annual Sinterklaas parade
and the return of the beloved Frost
Giants to their annual
Winter’s Eve ramble around NYC’s Lincoln
Center.
Who knows if any of these events will approach
the lifespan of the Zvončari? We do know
that processions today act as a gathering point
for collective, creative action, in a time
marked nationally by divisiveness and cynicism.
If the Zvončari teach us anything, it is
that local community-based performance – with
all its clamor and chaos – is a potent and
durable art form. As we look back in gratitude
to the 2000+ people who took part in PAW’s
workshops and performances this year, we welcome
your continued
support to keep the
cowbells ringing in 2018.
Hoping our paths will cross again in the coming
year,
Alex and Sophia |
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BLOOM:
A CARETAKER'S DIARY
Vizcaya
Museum and Gardens, Miami, FL
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In
June, PAW returned to Miami as
artists-in-residence at Vizcaya, the fantastical
seaside villa of 1920s industrialist, James
Deering. Whereas last year’s performance of Whirl roamed
the pristine pathways of Vizcaya’s public
gardens, our new project explored the heretofore
inaccessible spaces of Vizcaya’s “Village”,
a complex of now-derelict buildings, stables,
and farmyards that fulfilled Deering’s vision
of a self-sustaining model farm community,
supporting dozens of resident workers and their
families.
To create Bloom, we
combed through the 1922 farm diary of Vizcaya
garden supervisor I.N. Court. During a week of
collaborative workshops, we invited participants
to create illuminated objects from a curated
menu of diary entries. A precise litany of
everyday tasks, agricultural challenges, and
human dramas took shape as a glowing retinue of
livestock, exotic flora and fauna, farm
implements, domestic objects, and architectural
details.
On the night of June 27 over 1000 visitors
entered the Vizcaya Village, many for the first
time, with only illuminated rosebuds to guide
their way. Visitors were free to wander, as the
long-dormant buildings and grounds slowly came
to life with lanterns conjuring the daily life
of the Village a century ago. Court’s own
words (hauntingly narrated by John Dyer)
provided an incantatory soundscape while
projections of handwritten excerpts and archival
images flickered in dusty windows. For the
finale, illuminated panels emerged from the
Banyan groves and assembled into a recreation of
Vizcaya’s lost Greenhouse. Audience and
performers merged and paraded out together
beneath a canopy of glowing panes, leaving the
Village again in darkness, but looking toward
its bright future as Vizcaya’s newest public
space.
PAW returns next summer for the third
installment of our performance trilogy,
exploring the role of maritime fantasy and dread
in Deering's vision for Vizcaya. Stay tuned...
See
Vizcaya's short video of Bloom.... |
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CABINET
OF CURIOSITIES:
44th Annual NY Village Halloween Parade
Greenwich
Village, NYC
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In
1842 PT Barnum stitched the head of a monkey
onto a stuffed fish, and the Fiji Mermaid was
born. We laugh now, but Barnum’s Museum was
the Carnivalesque forerunner of what became the
modern science museum. Barnum straddled a past
when Cabinets of Curiosity commingled real and
imaginary natural relics, and a future when
genomic engineering promises to unleash a host
of unimaginable hybrids into our midst.
Halloween, of course, revels in hybrids,
mash-ups and the frisson of
crossed identities. We know, as Mary Shelley did
in 1818, that the scariest thing in Frankenstein
was not the monster but the Doctor, who dared to
create new life from a patchwork of disparate
and disembodied parts. Over time, the human urge
to re-imagine life has fed obsessions with
Sasquatch footprints, Loch Ness Monster
snapshots, and Chupacabra crime scenes. The Fiji
Mermaid is alive and well, and our collective
Cabinet of Wonder has grown exponentially. Where
Barnum and Dr. Frankenstein once used needle and
thread, today’s molecular biologists now use
CRISPR/CAS technology, but the result is the
same: the sleep of reason can breed monsters.
So, with Frankenstein’s bicentennial
approaching, PAW assembled its own Cabinet of
Wonder for NY’s 44th Annual Village Halloween
Parade, calling on our creative corps to fill
its drawers with monsters of their own devising.
Inspired by the Surrealist game of “exquisite
corpse”, we invited our team of makers to fill
36 museum cases with a collection of
interchangeable heads, bodies, and tails (yielding
over 1700 possible permutations). On Halloween
Night our bestiary of triptych hybrids set off
up Sixth Avenue, periodically assembling into a
towering display, then recombining into new
creatures, hatched from the Hallowed Halls of
Cryptozoology and bound for a brave new world.
See
video excerpt from from Cabinet of Curiosities.
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2nd
ANNUAL OYSTER BAY HALLOWEEN
Raynham Hall Museum, Oyster Bay, NY
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One
could hardly ask for better partners in starting
a new Halloween tradition than the Raynham Hall
Museum, a Colonial-era house in Oyster Bay and
the site of many purported ghost sightings.
Last year we helped inaugurate Oyster Bay’s
first annual Halloween Parade with 18-foot tall
silk figures with faces digitally transposed
from Daguerreotypes of Raynham Hall’s
19th-century residents. Organizers expecting a
hundred spectators for a new event were amazed
when 500 showed up, many in costume and ready to
perform. This year we added another layer
of local lore to the parade, paying tribute to
Raynham Hall’s Revolutionary War history as
home to the legendary Culper Spy Ring. Inspired
by reported sightings of British spy Major
Andre’s white, spectral horse, we created
life-sized, fully animated ghost horses carrying
riders in Revolutionary War garb. Predictably,
the crowds doubled in size this year, a
promising start for a newly seeded tradition
with deep local roots. |
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THE
SECRET GARDENS:
6th Annual Morningside Lights
Columbia
University & Morningside Park
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PAW
continued its collaboration with Columbia
University’s Arts Initiative and Miller
Theatre, leading the annual Morningside Lights
lantern procession through Harlem’s
Morningside Park for the 6th year. For this
year's performance, we reached out to local
community gardens and urban farms to create The
Secret Gardens.
Harlem’s tightly packed grid offers less open
space per capita than almost any neighborhood in
New York City. Yet nestled within its dense
blocks lies an open secret: more than 60
community gardens bloom on formerly vacant lots
adopted, tended (and often defended) by local
volunteers. Like a weed pushing its way through
the crack in the pavement, Harlem’s
irrepressible urge to garden (and its deep
tradition of civic activism), has seeded a
culture of vitality in dozens of neglected lots.
The Secret Gardens honored
the tireless, resourceful visionaries who have,
lot by lot, shovel by shovel, transformed Harlem
from concrete jungle into secret garden. PAW led
a week of collaborative lantern-building
sessions to create an illuminated landscape
populated by the specific flora, fauna and
figments of Harlem’s eccentric gardens.
Working alongside stakeholders from the
McCracken Truce Garden, Brotherhood / Sister
Soul, and the Columbia Secondary School Garden,
workshop participants got to know Harlem’s
hidden horticultural gems first-hand, from those
who had grown them. The result was a luminous
bounty of 50 giant lanterns many of which,
having lit up Morningside Park’s dark pathways
for one night, went on to permanent homes in
gardens and homes throughout the neighborhood,
to seed new community celebrations in the
future.
See
a short video about The
Secret Gardens by Nidal
Qanari @ Harlem OneStop....
Get
involved or learn more @ official Morningside
Lights website |
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LEGEND
and SPIES
Stony Brook, NY
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In
August, the Ward Melville Heritage Organization
commissioned PAW to create 5 giant figures to
spearhead a new procession for their yearly
holiday revels. Inspired by the naturalistic
portraiture of Spanish gigantes or the bonecos
of Brazilian Carnaval, we created 13’- tall
articulated puppets of key players in Stony
Brook’s long history. The lifelike figures
portrayed Revolutionary War spymasters Benjamin
Tallmadge and Caleb Brewster, 19th-Century
shipping tycoon Jonas Smith, and 20th century
philanthropists Ward and Dorothy Melville. Local
Youth Corps volunteers created a fleet of
Clipper ships and other performing objects,
adding another layer of historic context. New
creations and new stories are in the works, as
we continue to build on Stony Brook’s
procession for next year.
PHOTOS:
Heidi Sutton
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MORINESIO MIDSUMMER PAGEANT
and
PUPPET WORKSHOP
Morinesio, Italy
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Our
Pageant Puppetry Workshop returns to the Italian
Alps in 2018, from June 30 to July 8.
This past summer, when the giant serpent emerged
from its customary hiding place behind the
cliffside shrine, it was animated by a group of
local teenagers led by the mayor’s daughter.
At that moment, we marveled that, 15 years ago,
when we began our Puppet Workshop and Midsummer
Pageant in the Italian village of Morinesio,
most of the kids performing had not yet been
born. They have no memory of a Morinesio without
puppets, through which they rekindle the
personal histories, folklore, and agrarian
rituals of their parents’ and grandparents’
generations each year.
The local kids also worked alongside
international participants to build the
procession in our yearly Pageant Puppetry
workshop. Together they breathed new life into
Nebbiasa, the menacing fog spirit, revisited the
stories of migrant violet-pickers, and
introduced the local tale of the priest who
shape-shifts into a cat by night. Accompanied by
traditional Occitan music, nearly 200
participants turned up to perform the mile-long
procession to the old church, with no audience
but ourselves to enjoy what has become a
seasonal ritual in the Val Maira.
Enrollment is now open for next summer’s
workshop (with early bird discounts available).
The workshop covers basic techniques in papier-mâché
mold-making, bamboo armatures, puppet
articulation and movement, and processional
choreography. Classes take place amidst stunning
mountain vistas, locally-grown gourmet meals,
and an evening of Occitan step-dancing with the
locals, all culminating in the Midsummer
Procession and an all-night Festa.
Join
us this summer or learn more ….
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FROST
GIANTS:
Winter's Eve Festival
Lincoln Square, NYC
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| The
Frost Giants brought their icy glow back to the
streets around New York’s Lincoln Center this
November, as signature elements of the 18th
Annual Winter’s Eve Festival. Originally
created in workshops at NY’s Architectural
League, the Futurist-inspired figures now play a
key role in New York’s largest outdoor holiday
celebration. Moving with a glacial cadence
through the crowd of 25,000 spectators, the
seven illuminated puppets took some by surprise,
while others in the crowd called out to them by
name, confirming their growing status as
familiar markers of the season’s arrival.
This year’s procession assumed an
unexpected political overtone, as the Giants
merged briefly with a Black Lives Matter march
on the steps of Lincoln Center. Many thanks to
our intrepid troupe of 21 puppeteers who braved
low-lying branches, dense crowds, and breezy
conditions to bring their Giants to life with a
flourish of nimble Arabesques, fluid strides,
and intimate interactions throughout the evening. |
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SINTERKLAAS
Rhinebeck, NY
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Rhinebeck’s
eclectic, esoteric and raucous answer to generic
holiday clichés celebrated its 10th year in
grand style. This year’s Honored Animal was
the Elephant – actually two, a mother and
child. Drawing an arc from the Hudson Valley’s
prehistoric mastodons to the endangered species
of today, Sinterklaas director Jeanne Fleming
linked the elephant to strong family bonds,
mythic memory, and boundless compassion. In
local workshops, we wove strands of rattan and
basket-reed into life-sized spectral pachyderms,
who ambled forward with gait both earthly and
ethereal, as befits a creature caught between a
mythic past and an uncertain future.
See
more images from Sinterklaas...
PHOTOS:
Alex H. Wagner | Douglas Baz
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“WOW.
I just experienced one of the coolest, most
incredible moments of my life. That parade
was sensational, absolutely amazing…. I'm
still on a high from being surrounded by so
many thousands of people, who were DELIGHTED
by what they saw.”
PAW
volunteer in NY’s Halloween Parade
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When
we founded Processional Arts Workshop 10 years
ago, we had no idea if it would be even remotely
possible to make community processions a
sustainable, year-round vocation. All of you –
through your dedicated work, your imaginative
input, your dynamic performances, and your
financial support – have provided the
resounding YES, year after year. Affirmations
from volunteers like the one above give us new
resolve each day, and your donations help us
bridge the gaps between projects, research and
develop new works, and keep the lights on. Most
of all, you make it possible for hundreds of
people to come together and share the act of
making, creating an art that is far greater than
the sum of its parts.
Whether or not you have before, please consider
contributing to PAW today. We welcome your
support at any level. You can also support PAW
simply by shopping on Amazon through the Amazon
Smile Program, which redirects a small
percentage of every purchase you make to help
sustain our work.
Contributions can be sent via PAW's
secure Paypal server, or if you prefer,
directly to Processional Arts Workshop, Inc. 90
La Bergerie Lane, Red Hook, NY 12571. PAW is a
non-profit Federal tax-exempt 501(c)(3)
organization, so all donations are
tax-deductible to the full extent of the law. |
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PAW
on SOCIAL MEDIA: Come
find us!
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| Nearly
1000 people now follow PAW on Facebook
and Instagram. We post updates about
projects, show sketches and images from
works in progress, post calls for
spontaneous performance or workshop
opportunities, and share links to
Carnivalesque traditions and
contemporary artists that have inspired
us. Others have started using the
hashtag #processionalarts to share their
experiences of our work. We continue to
send out newsletters and bulletins for
major projects, but if you would like to
track us more closely, we invite you to
tune in to PAW’s Instagram
feed or to "Like"
our Facebook
Page (make sure to
turn "Notifications On" if you
don't want to miss a post!). |
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