Sunday, April 27, 2014

Howl Theatre Project

Howl Manifesto

The hour between dog and wolf, that is, dusk, when the two cant be distinguished from each other, suggests a lot of other things besides the time of dayThe hour in whichevery being becomes his own shadow, and thus something other than himself. The hour of metamorphoses, when people half hope, half fear that a dog will become a wolf. The hour that comes down to us from at least as far back as the early Middle Ages, when country people believed that transformation might happen at any moment.  --Jean Genet

When there is a certain alchemy at work, where social and historical forces are caught in a dangerous tango, our sensibilities are being manipulated by machines that we didn't create ourselves, in a time of technologies our grandparents couldn't even dream of, and we find ourselves burning with an energy, a certain tangible energy, in the company of like-minded, like-spirited individuals who, when working together sense a common spark of LIFE, it is time to create something new.  To gather together and create something new, and move with the flow of this alchemical reaction.  And so.  We have THIS. HOWL THEATRE PROJECT.

The birthday is today, this 30th of March, 2014, although our real origins come long before this and, like all origins, is impossible to pinpoint because by nature we avoid being caught in any kind of cross hairs. 

For YEARS NOW, we have been playing in sandboxes of experimental art, performance art, and almost every kind of manifestation of theatre one could imagine.  Furiously resistant to mechanical and politically empty forms, we have discovered that we all love and miss one thing: the primacy of our own animal natures, and our capacity to form meaningful connections.  And we found ourselves occasionally in love with these moments when the connection was made visible through an art form we love utterly.  Once, we all thought we would throw off all the mantles of theatre in order to create something new, but found these forms to be insufficient.  They made us wonder and desire and experiment, but they left us unsatisfied, and at the end of every day we went to bed HUNGRY.

The most abhorrent things about theatre today (the artifice, the pretense, the lack of conviction) are very new, and the most transformative things about theatre today (the ritual, the animal connection, the stories of how it is to live and love inside a body with a pulse) are very old.  So we are taking back those old mantles, though in truth, they never went away, they just hid in the shadows, sometimes watching us and sometimes possessing us.

Every artist is a manifestation of all the ancestors in the blood line, and all blood lines go back to where we are obviously and completely and unavoidably connected.  And so, like all artists must do if they are to create the work they were born to do, we recognize our connections, to each other, to the living, to those not yet born, and those who live in our blood.  That is, we recognize our DEAD, and we make work that speaks directly to them. We are all PHANTOMS, and we tell you the stories that our ancestors told to us, in new forms, for a world that is absolutely modern.  We are animal ghosts, and so are you.  

Mental work and intellectual work can speak to our ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE, because, as thinking animals, we know when something is true.  But the work that places the intellectual mind above the animal mind will always replicate the same mistakes the lead to every bloody revolution: the head is cut from the body, and we forget that we are not controlled by, but are hard wired to live in accordance with natural forces.  Our own HUNGER, our cycles of DESIRE, and our capacities for compassion, laughter, and joy.  And the phases of the MOON, the TIDES, and the play between LIGHT AND SHADOW.  

So.  HOWL is an urgent response to an urgent impulse to make noises after dark, to tell the stories that we recognize not with our split selves (split from our animal natures) but through the rabbit holes in time and space that lead us back to the whole, where the head and the heart and the belly speak the same lost language. It is a theatre based in DESIRE, a celebration of our ANIMAL INSTINCTS, and a WAKING UP to natural magic, an alchemy that invites you inside.  



We are:

Christopher Danowski - Director of the Art Parts
Jake Jack Hylton - Director of the Artistries
Jamie Haas Hendricks - Director of Secret Messages and Public Stammers
Steven Matthew Kaas - Director of Poetics of Time and Space 

Company Members:
Heather Lee Harper
Liana O'Boyle
Beth May

Our first show: endofplay (part 3 of Monsters of the Sea) will be May 22, 23, 24 and May 30, 31 at 8pm
and June 1 at 6pm
At Space 55
Stay tuned for more details....

Friday, April 4, 2014

Howl Manifesto

Howl Manifesto 

The hour between dog and wolf, that is, dusk, when the two cant be distinguished from each other, suggests a lot of other things besides the time of dayThe hour in whichevery being becomes his own shadow, and thus something other than himself. The hour of metamorphoses, when people half hope, half fear that a dog will become a wolf. The hour that comes down to us from at least as far back as the early Middle Ages, when country people believed that transformation might happen at any moment.  --Jean Genet

When there is a certain alchemy at work, where social and historical forces are caught in a dangerous tango, our sensibilities are being manipulated by machines that we didn't create ourselves, in a time of technologies our grandparents couldn't even dream of, and we find ourselves burning with an energy, a certain tangible energy, in the company of like-minded, like-spirited individuals who, when working together sense a common spark of LIFE, it is time to create something new.  To gather together and create something new, and move with the flow of this alchemical reaction.  And so.  We have THIS. HOWL THEATRE PROJECT.

The birthday is today, this 30th of March, 2014, although our real origins come long before this and, like all origins, is impossible to pinpoint because by nature we avoid being caught in any kind of cross hairs. 

For YEARS NOW, we have been playing in sandboxes of experimental art, performance art, and almost every kind of manifestation of theatre one could imagine.  Furiously resistant to mechanical and politically empty forms, we have discovered that we all love and miss one thing: the primacy of our own animal natures, and our capacity to form meaningful connections.  And we found ourselves occasionally in love with these moments when the connection was made visible through an art form we love utterly.  Once, we all thought we would throw off all the mantles of theatre in order to create something new, but found these forms to be insufficient.  They made us wonder and desire and experiment, but they left us unsatisfied, and at the end of every day we went to bed HUNGRY.

The most abhorrent things about theatre today (the artifice, the pretense, the lack of conviction) are very new, and the most transformative things about theatre today (the ritual, the animal connection, the stories of how it is to live and love inside a body with a pulse) are very old.  So we are taking back those old mantles, though in truth, they never went away, they just hid in the shadows, sometimes watching us and sometimes possessing us.

Every artist is a manifestation of all the ancestors in the blood line, and all blood lines go back to where we are obviously and completely and unavoidably connected.  And so, like all artists must do if they are to create the work they were born to do, we recognize our connections, to each other, to the living, to those not yet born, and those who live in our blood.  That is, we recognize our DEAD, and we make work that speaks directly to them. We are all PHANTOMS, and we tell you the stories that our ancestors told to us, in new forms, for a world that is absolutely modern.  We are animal ghosts, and so are you.  

Mental work and intellectual work can speak to our ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE, because, as thinking animals, we know when something is true.  But the work that places the intellectual mind above the animal mind will always replicate the same mistakes the lead to every bloody revolution: the head is cut from the body, and we forget that we are not controlled by, but are hard wired to live in accordance with natural forces.  Our own HUNGER, our cycles of DESIRE, and our capacities for compassion, laughter, and joy.  And the phases of the MOON, the TIDES, and the play between LIGHT AND SHADOW.  

So.  HOWL is an urgent response to an urgent impulse to make noises after dark, to tell the stories that we recognize not with our split selves (split from our animal natures) but through the rabbit holes in time and space that lead us back to the whole, where the head and the heart and the belly speak the same lost language. It is a theatre based in DESIRE, a celebration of our ANIMAL INSTINCTS, and a WAKING UP to natural magic, an alchemy that invites you inside.  




MANIFESTO OF CROSSED ONTOLOGIES Everybody (and by everybody I don ’ t mean everybody I think I mean one person, and I mean you, in par...