Peril, Us

“Peril, us” was an opportunity for Director Rebecca Martinez and I to explore the creation of an optimistic participatory performance event exploring real and perceived danger. Through clown work, flag dancing, object transformation and audience interaction we cut through drifting fog banks of fear, attempting to build an experience of mutual aid. We peel apart whiteness, walls, weapons, and ways we separate from ourselves when we rely on a safety constructed by those paid to protect us. (Which ‘us’ from who and what?) We gnaw on the instruction to “say something if we see something” through a spasming aperture of shared struggles to calibrate the scale of an onslaught of ‘somethings’: mosquitos, police batons, warm mayonnaise, hurricanes, etc. 

We quake and commiserate through intimate absurdities and prep the public with tools for symbiotic survival. In process and product we aim to create a piece that honors individual anxieties and shared traumas while resisting on-going oppressions and existential horror. We work to transform private panic and public paranoia into a handmade forcefield of courage built of camaraderie and cardboard.

We are building a community of devisors to write the play in conversation with. Early development of this piece was supported by a 2019 Audrey Residency at New Georges Theater.

Eli has continued developing the clown piece of the project (entitled “Sloughing") by collaborating with live-foley soundtrack-makers/musicians for cabaret performances. Most recently, Eli performed it at the Great Small Works Spaghetti Dinner at Judson Memorial Church (with Deepali Gupta) and at The Kelly Writer’s House in Philly (with Izzy Sazak). They also performed it as an opening act for Bread & Puppet in Providence, RI.

Meanwhile, Eli has also some cardboard survival gear building workshops as embodied research for the play/life and to inform the hands-on, participatory part of our show wherein the audience makes (and swaps?!) cardboard protective wear or talismans.

Photo Credit: Jaynie Saunders Tiller, Erik McGregor, and screenshots from video by David Pym