Bell pianist: Margaret Leng Tan
performers: John
Bell, Trudi Cohen, Stephen Kaplin, Alessandra Nichols, Jenny Romaine,
Roberto Rossi, Mark Sussman, Isaac Bell
music: Erik Satie, John Cage, Aristide Bruant, Toby Twining
movement director: Clarinda Mac Law
film: Meredith Holch
projection: Rand Huebsch
masks: Stephen Kaplin
technical director: Dave Overcamp
stage manager: Noah Harrell
lighting: Mark Sussman, Boualem ben Gueddach
scenery: Mark Sussman, Alessandra Nichols
photos: Orlando Marra
Includes American
premiere of Geneviéve de Brabant
(Satie's miniature opera for marionettes)
Performance Schedule: December 20 - 30, 2001
Thursday - Sunday 7:30pm
Sunday Matinee 2:30pm
The Annex Theatre
$20.00
The Obie-winning ensemble
Great Small Works has a gift for dramatizing autobiography with unusual puppetry,
exceptional music and astute acting. The troupe's last work was the stunning
"Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln" (La MaMa, 2000), which adapted
a pre-modern Yiddish memoir of a pious Jewish wife into picture recitation form,
using an orchestral score by Frank London of the Klezmatics. Now the ensemble
shifts its creative eye to the fin de siecle life and work of French modernist
composer Erik Satie with "A Mammal's Notebook: the Erik Satie Cabaret,"
directed by John Bell, featuring pianist Margaret Leng Tan and showcasing the
American premiere of "Geneviéve de Brabant," Satie's miniature
opera for marionettes.
The production utilizes
Satie's drawings and his acerbic, prescient letters and speeches, as well as
words others (including John Cage and Jean Cocteau) wrote about him. Great Small
Works performers perform the variety of avant-garde and every-day characters
inhabiting this turn-of- the-century urban world of new life and new art. The
play is staged with a changing combination of dance, shadow theater, mask performance,
film, bunraku puppetry and vaudeville performance forms. It is a variety spectacle
about what it means to make music, art, and theater at the beginning of the
last century, in a society marked by constant, destabilizing change. John Bell,
well-known for his work with Bread and Puppet Theater and The Ninth Street
Theater, is one of the foremost US experts on popular performance and puppet
theater and a professor of performing arts at Emerson College. Foremost among
the show's attractions is Margaret Leng Tan, the "diva of the avant-garde," who
is renowned for her performances that defy the piano's conventional boundaries. Erik
Satie's music spanned an enormous range: he wrote for Chat Noir Cabaret shadow
puppet shows, mystical Rosicrucian theatricals, solo piano, popular song hits,
puppet operas, oratorios and Dada spectacles. One of Satie's most well-crafted
works of art was his life: he consciously invented himself as one of the first "avant-garde"
artists. "A Mammal's Notebook" examines, recreates, and celebrates
a crucial period of his life (1893-1914), when Satie plunged into the social
and commercial life of working-class Paris and emerged a confident and determined
composer, able to fuse the disparate worlds of avant-garde art and everyday
urban life. Music of the play also
includes familiar and irresistible works by Satie ("Gymnopedie" and
"Je Te Veux") as well as the unfamiliar and cryptic pieces born of
Satie's forays into Rosicrucianism. Alongside music by Satie's contemporary,
Aristide Bruant, are eloquent twentieth-century tributes to Satie: John Cage's
idyllic "In a Landscape" (as accompaniment to a stroll through nineteenth
century Paris) and Toby Twining's haunting "Satie Blues," a piece
written for toy piano and piano. "Geneviéve
de Brabant," Satie's miniature opera for marionettes, was written for a
pantomime destined for the Comèdie Parisiénne. The manuscript
was discovered after Satie's death, behind one of the pianos in his tiny room
in Arcueil. This rarely-heard operetta will be staged with shadow puppets designed
by Stephen Kaplin. Great Small Works is a
New-York based collective of theater artists--John Bell, Trudi Cohen, Stephen
Kaplin, Jenny Romaine, Roberto Rossi and Mark Sussman--who draw on folk,
avant-garde and popular theater traditions to address contemporary issues.
The company creates theater on a variety of scales, from gigantic outdoor
parades, circuses and street spectacles, to theater on miniature proscenium
stages. Its productions include "The Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln," directed by Jenny
Romaine, the Fifth International Toy Theater Festival at HERE, "Toy Theater
of Terror As Usual Episode 10," "King George and the Devil" for
the 2001 Chicago Puppetropolis Festival, "The True Story of Charas,"
"Procession to End All Evil" at the DUMBO Arts Festival and ongoing
Monthly Spaghetti Dinners at P.S. 122. In awarding an Obie to
Great Small Works in 1996-7, Village Voice drama editor Ross Wetzsteon said,
"they have breathed new, pointed life into the form of Toy Theater."
Reviewing "The Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln" at La MaMa, The
New York Times (Lawrence Van Gelder) praised "the array of theatrical art
and artifice marshaled in the telling of the story" and its "admirable
cast." The Village Voice (Alisa Solomon) called the group's aesthetic "direct,
smartly self-conscious and profoundly poor" and culturally powerful enough
to be a formative force of a "new Yiddish culture." Margaret Leng
Tan is recognised as "the leading exponent of John Cage's music today" (The New Republic)
and "the most convincing interpreter of Cage's keyboard music" (The
New York Times). She has appeared in the PBS "American Masters" films
on John Cage and Jasper Johns and her latest Cage recording, "Works of
Calder", will be released in March on Mode Records. In 2OO2, she will present
Tenth anniversary commemorative Cage tributes worldwide including Carnegie Hall's
"When Morty Met John" Cage/Feldman Festival, the Berliner Festspiele
and the Melbourne Festival. Ms. Tan is also the world's only professional toy
pianist, "a keyboard virtuoso like no other who turned toys into art "
(The San Francisco Chronicle). Her 1997 album, "The Art of the Toy Piano"
(Point/Universal), received major media acclaim. As a Cage protegée
and pioneer in the vanguard of American new music, Margaret Leng Tan represents
an unbroken trajectory from Erik Satie through John Cage to the present. "A
Mammal's Notebook: the Erik Satie Cabaret" is performed by John Bell,
Trudi Cohen, Aya Kanai, Stephen Kaplin, Margaret Leng Tan, Alessandra Nichols,
Jenny Romaine, Roberto Rossi, Mark Sussman and Isaac Bell. Set design is by
Mark Sussman and Alessandra Nichols. Lighting design is by Mark Sussman and
Boualem ben Gueddach. Costume design is by Alessandra Nichols, Jenny Romaine,
Trudi Cohen and Mildred Cohen. Puppet Design is by Stephen Kaplin. Movement
Director is Clarinda Mac Low. Film is by Meredith Holch. Projection is by Rand
Huebsch. Shadow Puppet Text is by Burt Porter. Dramaturgical support is by
Remi Paillard. Technical Director is Dave Overcamp. Stage Manager is Noah Harrell.
The production acknowledges the generous support of the Jim Henson Foundation,
Scherman Foundation, NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs, NY State Council on the
Arts, Kornfeld Foundation, NY Times Foundation, New York Foundation for the
Arts, Rockefeller MAP fund, Florence Gould Foundation and The Emerson College
Stearns Distinguished Faculty Award.
