Processional Arts Workshop
SITE-SPECIFIC PROJECTS
We develop and design each project in response to the histories, environment, cultural ethos, or current challenges of a particular place, people, or moment. In most cases, we build everything in tandem with local residents and community partners, running free workshops where we give participants the creative tools to bring their collective imagination to life. The deeply collaborative process kindles a visual conversation that yields epic yet intimate performances in public space, embodying the stories that uniquely define a community.
Invisible Cities:
PS21 Chatham, NY
“The city ... is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember” ~ Italo Calvino
Puppets typically take the form of figures or animals, but how would one embody an entire city in motion? How might a viewer enter and inhabit that city, if only for a moment? And how do cities enmesh us in an intricate choreography of performing objects? These were some of the questions we asked ourselves when, as visiting artists at PS21's Pathways program, we created a roving performance based on Italo Calvino’s "Invisible Cities". Revealed in Marco Polo’s reports to Kublai Khan of his sprawling, ungraspable empire, Calvino's description of 55 imaginary cities unfolds as a kaleidoscopic allegory of how we inhabit, negotiate, and remember shared spaces. The cities seem fantastical yet strangely familiar, as we struggle, like the Emperor, to comprehend the reality of a vast yet precarious human enterprise. Guided by Calvino's evocative chapter headings – Cities and Memory, Cities and Eyes, Hidden Cities, Cities and the Dead, and so on – we invited local participants to create and embody their imagined cities as pageant puppets, body extensions, and performing objects. The culminating performance transformed PS21's surrounding woodlands and meadows into an animated landscape of architectural follies. Guided only by cryptic emblems, found sounds, and fragmentary texts, visitors encountered cities as they wandered, trying to make sense of a once-familiar world that seemed to fade, with each step, into an elusive, half-remembered dream. Invisible Cities was funded in part by a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. See more images from Invisible Cities @ ps21chatham.org/events/invisible-cities/
The High Line: Opening of the Rail Yards
NYC
The High Line, New York's celebrated elevated park, inaugurated its final span, extending public access to the former West Side rail line over the Penn Rail Yards along the Hudson River, and up to 34th Street. Friends the High Line invited PAW to design a procession to mark the opening of the park’s third section, extending its path over the Rail Yards up to 34th Street. Gonzalo Casals, FHL’s Director of Public Programs, envisioned a neighborhood event that would involve local residents in the design process and offer them the opportunity to take very first steps onto the new span. Over the course of several weeks, PAW led many town hall meetings to gather stories, images, and perspectives on the High Line, and far West Side neighborhoods through which it runs. In August, these personal histories and reflection took on physical form through a series of free drop-in workshops at Westbeth Center for the Arts. Drawing from the structural aesthetics of the High Line and the surrounding industrial architecture, participants created giant railroad signal lights, whose lenses were illuminated with stained-glass vignettes exploring a treasury of West Side stories. Iconic images captured the full range of a neighborhood’s evolving ethos, evoking meat-packing plants and disco clubs, Florent and von Furstenberg, longshoreman and drag queens, liners and diners, and much more. The procession began at the southern end of the High Line, led by an airborne 1930 locomotive and fabled West Side Cowboy. At each stop a different contingent of marchers joined the growing procession, identified by colored silk banners and led by giant totemic figures surrounded by long banners of silk. As each group ascended to the park, a new chapter of West Side vernacular history was introduced: Movers and Makers; Meat, Markets,& Malllowmars; On the Waterfront; The Wild West Side; and Vision & Re-Vision. Each krewe formed a corridor on the narrow path to greet the next, and when last group sashayed down the line, everyone let loose in wild circle dance. Ultimately more than 500 local residents, artists, activists, and community members – along with the occasional movie star and Senator – came on board to make an unforgettable inaugural journey to 34th Street.
Morningside Lights:
Miller Theatre at Columbia University and Harlem, NY
Morningside Lights is an annual illuminated procession that traverses Harlem's Morningside Park to the main campus of Columbia University. Started by PAW in 2012 in collaboration with Brenna St. George Jones and Melissa Smey of Columbia's Arts Initiative, the procession is remade from scratch each year in community workshops at Columbia's Miller Theatre. Over the course of a single week participants from different neighborhoods, generations, backgrounds, and perspectives collaborate to build dozens of giant lanterns that explore and illuminate annual themes encompassing Classical mythology, utopian architecture, vanishing ecologies, contested monuments, banned books, and Harlem Rennaissance figures like Duke Ellington, Romare Beardon, and Langston Hughes. Brightening the paths of a NYC park once shunned by many local residents after dark, Morningside Lights has leveraged the power of community procession to reclaim public space and aided local efforts to bring new life to the Olmsted-designed park.
Learn more @ morningside-lights.com
Shine a Light:
Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival
Inspired by the Met Opera’s storied “sputnik” chandeliers, we re-imagined a past Halloween Parade performance of Shine A Light – a reflection on the shape of light and the radiant diffusion of our expanding Universe. Shine A Light dispersed a constellation of prism-clad chandeliers and gyrating lampshades to emerge from obscure corners of Lincoln Center’s public spaces, gradually enveloping festival-goers and passers-by. A slowly accumulating procession drew crowds into its wake and culminated in a final orbit around the Plaza Fountain, leaving behind gifts of glowing orbs in the hands of a lucky few (hinting at the afterglow of an expanding universe). Against the backdrop of the plazas’ soaring space-age modernism, Shine a Light reflected on how the everyday flick of a switch can turn the ineffable and eternal into the graspable and finite.
PEN World Voices Festival: A Procession of Confessions
East Village, NYC
For the finale of NYC's 2014 PEN WorldVoices Festival, PAW led nearly one hundred participants, makers, and remote contributors in a Procession of Confessions. Amidst ongoing revelations about clandestine government surveillance, the Procession of Confessions provided a way to reclaim control of our information – by freely offering it up to whoever may be watching. Participants welcomed the chance to publicly flaunt their meta-data, display banal personal details, and reveal the metrics of their misdemeanors in a collective act of exhibitionism. Integrating large-scale puppetry with crowd-sourced sound and live video, this modern-day parade of PENitents coincided with scattered solo performances worldwide joining in a simultaneous Flash-cloud of confessions. During the Festival, PAW led a series of drop-in workshops to construct and animate visual elements for the Procession. Drawing from the infrastructure of surveillance and the dark theater of Communist-era show trials, volunteers helped embody the specter of government overreach as a nest of arachnid eavesdroppers and cyclopean watchers whose video eyes harvested and webcast the confessions of costumed penitents en route, leaving uneasy questions in their wake.
Whirl / Bloom / Float / Weave
Vizcaya Museum and Gardens. Miami, FL
A two-week artist residency at James Deering's Jazz-era waterfront fantasy estate in Miami grew into a four-year performance cycle. Collaborating with Vizcaya Museum curators, horticulturalists, and hundreds of local volunteers, we created a series of illuminated performance installations that explored a different aspect of the Museum collections, grounds, and broader historical context each year. "Whirl" rediscovered the crypto-zoologic worlds of iconoclast Robert W. Chanler. "Bloom" delved into Miami's early agrarian ventures and misadventures, using imagery and text from the 1920s Superintendent's Journal to reanimate a derelict farm village on the property. "Float" merged imagery from Vizcaya's fearsome pantheon of maritime sea-creatures with projections of flood-ravaged coastal US cities, evoking the precarious folly of a hyper-developed coast amidst rising seas. "Weave" assembled pattern-fragments from the Museum's textiles, ceramics, inlays, and other designs motifs – all gathered from Deering's globe-trotting buying sprees – questioning the uneasy mashup of disparate cultures under museum glass and the problematic history of collecting in general.
The Black Cat Committee
Kyiv, Ukraine
On a cool September evening in Kyiv, a rowdy procession of black cats, ambulatory windows, and ghostly projections emerged from the dark corners of the city's historic Anrdriyivskyy Descent, conjuring the spirit of Mikhail Bulgakov's darkly comic masterpiece "The Master and Margarita". Completed in 1940, but suppressed by Soviet censors until 1967, the book chronicles the arrival of the Devil in Moscow of the 1930s. As encounters between the Devil's retinue and Soviet-era officialdom descend into mayhem and magic, the novel revels in the anxieties and incapacities of a society stifled by bureaucratic conformity. In collaboration with the Les Kurbas Centre, PAW led a series of public workshops with students and local residents at the Kyiv–Mohyla Academy, exploring the contemporary relevance Bulgakov's multi-layered allegory in post-Soviet Ukraine. Integrating windows from Bulgakov's house on the Descent with hand-held projections and improvisational performances, the meandering night procession evoked the novel’s anarchic collision of the banal and the fantastic, drawing passers-by into a spontaneous and immersive experience. This project was made possible in part with funds from CEC Artslink, and in partnership with the Les Kurbas Centre and the Kyiv-Mohyla Theatre Centre "Pasika".
Mad Hatters' Parade:
Hudson, NY
PHOTO: China Jorrin
In a world that increasingly seems to have gone bonkers, might the only path to staying sane be to strap a gargantuan pair of feet on your head – or perhaps a gilded pineapple? banana toaster? a basketball hoop? A Lego ziggurat? – and then sashay down the middle of the road with mindless abandon. Each May, we put it to the test, as these and countless other joyful antidotes to a mad world run amok through the streets of Hudson, NY for the Annual Mad Hatters' Parade. This open-to-anyone wearable-art Parade celebrates Hudson’s evolving history as a city of makers, bringing together diverse communities to build a shared spectacle of the nonsensical. Started by PAW in 2019, the Parade grew out of an ongoing public conversation about Hudson’s need for more creative youth programing and for healthier cross-pollination among its economically stratified neighborhoods. PAW partners with local youth groups to organize weeks of free after-school art/costume workshops tailored for both teens and younger kids, as well as drop-in “Mad Hat Slams” open to the community at large. These collective building sessions have become a core part of the Parade’s annual mission to bring people together in a shared act of creativity and free expression. The results have been awe-inspiring. Each year, more than a hundred individual marchers and performers set off from Hudson’s Area Library through the streets of Hudson, each one a walking work of art. Local kids proudly strut their towering millinery creations right alongside established artists and professional designers from Hudson’s growing creative community, driven by the beats of local music groups and experimental sound artists. In a city that has at times struggled with the challenges arising from economic inequality and rapid gentrification, the Mad Hatters' Parade provides a democratized and inclusive platform for self-expression and performance art, highlighting all that unites us, whatever our differences may be.
The Great Pollinator Ramble:
Various locations
Would you know an Eastern Swallowtail if one landed in your garden? How about the Virgin Tiger Moth or the Pennsylvania Leatherwing Beetle? With insect species everywhere in catastrophic decline, the first step to saving them (and us) is to know them and their habitats. That is why, each year, we enlist bestiary of local pollinator puppets to highlight a different Hudson Valley landscape, inviting visitors to seek out larger-than-life butterflies, birds, beetles, and bees hidden in the wilderness and identify them with the help of a habitat map and “Life List”. The Great Pollinator Ramble was first commissioned in 2020 for the Olana State Historic Site and Thomas Cole National Historic Site. The pollinators have since made appearances at Opus 40, Wethersfield Gardens, and were honored guests at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where PAW birds and butterflies are now a tradition at the Spring Gala.
Odysseus at Hell Gate:
Socrates Sculpture Park. Queens, NY
On August 29, PAW and nearly a hundred intrepid volunteers transformed Socrates Sculpture Park into a performance installation that reimagined the history of New York’s forgotten islands through the lens of Homeric myth. Integrating pageant puppetry, intersecting micro-parades, and looping performances, Odysseus at Hell Gate paired texts from the Odyssey with historic accounts of North Brother Island, Hart Island, and other forgotten places in the city’s maritime shadowlands. Park visitors assumed the role of the homeward-bound hero, using fragmentary charts and haphazard guidance to navigate the capricious currents of New York’s complex island history, from potter’s fields to pleasure parks to penitentiaries. With no order or sequence, characters appeared and disappeared throughout the park, leaving lost mariners free to wander through a shifting immersive narrative.
Rights of Passage: Trinidad Carnival
Port of Spain, Trinidad
PHOTO: Stephan Falke
PHOTO: Stephan Falke
PHOTO: Stephan Falke
PHOTO: Stephan Falke
Global Carnival traditions form the core PAW's artistic and social practice. We first encountered Carnival as visiting artists to Trinidad on a Fulbright Fellowship, which enabled us to interact with artists and performers whose culture of processional art, or "Mas" has endured for 200 years. Heeding the Carnival maxim "Play yuhself!" we sought to integrate our research in Carnival traditions with our own vision as contemporary artists. The result, built and performed in collaboration with local Trinidadian participants, was a band of ten masqueraders that "played Mas" on Carnival Monday. "Rights of Passage" was our contemporary adaptation of the traditional Dragon Band. Constructing puppets, masks, and other elements from street materials and found objects, we portrayed the dragon’s frenetic, inhibited dance as a commentary on current constrictions of class, space, and mobility within the modern-day Carnival, and in Trinidad in general. First designed and performed in 1906 by Calypsonian “Chinee” Patrick, to introduce Chinese iconography into the Mas, the Dragon Band has evolved to include four basic characters: Bookman, Dragon, and Imps, and Queen Devils (Diablesses). The Bookman leads the troupe, taking note of the misdeeds of mankind, followed by the Dragon, who struggles against the chains of torments of his keepers, the Imps. The Dragon Dance is triggered at the band approaches a body of water – any gutter, puddle, or river-crossing will do. The Dragon is associated with the Devil and with fire, while water symbolizes the Holy Water of the Church, and by association all the prohibitions and hierarchies implied by any authority structure. The suddenly fearful Dragon writhes, shrinks, recoils, lashes out, and does anything in its power the avoid crossing the water, but eventually, dragged by the Imps, he leaps across, and continues down the road. Whether this crossing implies a supplication or a transgression, or both, is deliberately ambiguous. In either case, the Dragon Dance plays out a cyclic drama of constraint, rebellion, and release – a microcosm of Carnival itself. As newcomers to both Trinidad and Carnival, we chose the structure of the Dragon Band to respond to our personal observations of the class divisions and conflicts that currently afflict Trinidad. Killings, kidnappings, and assaults have spawned a pervasive aura of apprehension in Port-of-Spain, fueled by daily newspapers’ sensationalist tallies of the victims for the year. We felt our movements through the city increasingly precarious, as locals admonished us to avoid one neighborhood after another. Crime (and fear of crime) arises from economic disparity, and our daily commute confirmed the vast gulf that divides the abject poverty of Beetham Estates from gated communities of Maraval. As barriers, both psychological and physical, are erected between communities, a siege mentality prevails. Neighborhoods avoided become neighborhoods neglected and, ultimately, disenfranchised. Carnival has historically been seen as a “time out of time” when such divisions crumble, and social dissent finds its voice – whether in the tribal cohesion of Steelpan Bands, the biting satire of Calypso, or the transformative power of the Mas. Yet, today many Trinidadians we met feel disaffected with the increasing commercialization of Carnival. As large and profitable "bikini-and-beads" Mas Bands become the dominant visual expression Carnival, costumes have increasingly become more mass-produced and generic. Meanwhile, the cost to play in Band (as much as $1000 US) has effectively excluded working-class Trinidadians, from their own tradition of empowerment. The growing number of “All-inclusive” bands – self-contained luxury caravans of drinks, food, and security guards – have become the very definition of exclusivity. Thus Carnival, which once served to usurp class hierarchies, now reinforces them, as paying the fee for a premium band becomes a publicly affirmation of one's income and social status. Drawing inspiration from Earl Lovelace’s Dragon Can’t Dance and Hollis "Chalkdust" Liverpool’s Rituals of Power and Rebellion, we presented the Dragon Band as an alternative to the ethos of the modern Mas. The Dragon's Dance is, above all, about crossing established boundaries and confronting the fear that enforces them. Rejecting the prevailing Las Vegas Carnival aesthetic, we culled our materials instead from the vernacular materials of urban Trinidad: cardboard, plastic bags, newspaper, crocus cloth, and, in particular, razor-wire (safely replicated in Mylar). Unlike the typical Mas bands, we charged no fee to join the band and attracted several young Trinidadians who, disenchanted by the modern Carnival, had never before played Mas. Trinidadians speak with reverence about the moment one "passes the stage" (the main judging stage on the Queen's Park Savannah). At their urging, we stormed onstage without the official government permits required for all Carnival performers, leaving judges and audiences alike confounded by the ragged, anonymous Dragon Band that had at last claimed its right of passage.
Midsummer Pageant
Morinesio, Italy
We often think of processional art as a vessel for fragile narratives. A story, a recollection of everyday life, or a bit of local knowledge, passed down through generations must be told again and again to not fade away. A performing object, puppet, or other visual element drawn from these stories creates a durable physical image in procession, leaving questions in its wake and encouraging those who know to tell the stories in response. When we first encountered the village of Morinesio, high in the Italian Alps, its population, which peaked at 300 souls around 1900, had fallen to six full-time residents. Invited by local preservationist hosts to lead a puppet workshop for international participants, we delved into the folklore, material culture, agrarian practices, and local traditions, and personal histories of the village and the surrounding Occitan region. Working alongside local residents, participants created giant figurative puppets and animated objects inspired by villagers’ personal stories. After an intense week of work, the procession, led by local Occitan musicians, drew a hundred local residents, culminating in an all-night festa that few will forget. Over the course of nearly two decades Morinesio's Midsummer Pageant grew, encompassing new elements and new stories as it evolved. A generation of local kids grew up with the Pageant, taking on greater roles in building, performing and, most importantly, acting as keepers and interpreters of their parents’ and grandparents’ stories of life in the Val Maira.