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December 19-21, 2008
It's not like anything you've ever seen!
It's not like anything we've ever seen either!
Enjoy the ultimate in Puppet-viewing comfort and witness first hand a whirling melodious spectacle involving icebergs, native peoples, hippies, douglas firs, parachutes, sparkles, angry cats, snow, more snow, sea creatures, eggnog, singing, jokes, fanfare and treats!
This is an epic you NEED TO SEE!
Featuring
Musical stylings of Eric Potter
Sultry swinging singing of Monica Howe
MacDonald & Parr, producers/puppeteers at large
(or as we like to say... JP started it, but it's all Moira's fault.)
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Learning By Example
Dioramas By Cathy Akers
November 8-December 13, 2008
The series “Learning By Example” includes two dioramas populated by pregnant women, animals and their half-human, half-coyote children who live in an underground cave system and a forested, above-ground landscape. Portions of the work will be visible from the sidewalk outside of the Manual Archives through a series of peepholes. The full series may be viewed inside the building. “Learning By Example” expands on the artist’s earlier explorations of viewing and voyeurism by carefully controlling the manner in which viewers experience the work in both the public context of the storefront window and in the private environment of an exhibition space.
The self-contained world of “Learning By Example” imagines a female society in isolation from the rest of civilization. The women are free from many societal taboos, develop their own set of rules and practices, from assigned jobs to ritual sacrifices, which help maintain harmony among its members. The women pass down techniques of social control, and survival skills to their children in order to ensure the future success of the new animal-human hybrid race. This new race represents the beginning of a new world order, one in which primal instinct and the desire for a harmonious community exist in an uneasy balance.
“Learning By Example” is part of a body of work titled “Hertopia: An Illustrated History of the New World,” which includes several large-scale diorama installations that explore the growth and evolution of a female-only world.
Cathy Akers is an artist based in Los Angeles. Her multi-discipline practice spans sculpture, photography and installation. Her art addresses the relationship between people and nature, and women and nature in particular. Her recent work with dioramas challenges 20th century ideas of nature as being benevolent and of women as gentle and passive creatures, as well as early feminist notions of a world without men being a peaceful one. She received her MFA from CalArts in 2006 and her BFA from Tufts University in 1996. Her work has been exhibited widely through the U.S., as well as in the Czech Republic, Israel and England.
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Concrete Folk Variations: Chapter 2 Letters from Lilli
October 10th-19th, 2008
Concrete Folk Variations is a steely serial drama set in the lesbian bars, cop shops and street-cars of McCarthy era L.A. An epic puppet play mapping a labyrinthine culture stretching from the docks of Long Beach to the communist song circles of Silverlake-- secret codes, clandestine homosexual societies, flamboyant transgressions and soul crushing silence. This epic yarn is told with small-scale puppets, projections, and a minimalist mid-century Los Angeles cityscape
Chapter 2 follows Loretta Salt as she slips reluctantly into seams of the city and quietly examines a criminal narrative that reaches back into her own mournful past.
Performances
Friday October 10, 8PM
Sat October 11, 8PM and 10PM
Sunday October 12, 2PM and 5PM
Friday October 17, 8PM
Saturday October 18, 8PM and 10PM
Sunday October 19, 2PM and 5PM
Written and Directed by Susan Simpson
Performed by Max Daily, Kyle Leeser, Moira MacDonald, Julianna(J.P.)Parr, Susan Simpson and DanRae Wilson,
Music by Eric Potter
Costume Design by Jenny Koster
Video Design by Stephanie Kern
Lighting Design by Brandon Bake
WATCH an excerpt of Concrete Folk Variations 1.75 perfromed this summer at The Santa Monica Museum
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August 29th, 30th and 31st
Automata & The Manual Archives
present
Murder by Remote
and other songs
by Perry Hoberman
Perry Hoberman performs a song cycle with a loose thread that ranges from the Big Bang to the Heat Death of the universe. Time machines, online surveillance, telepathic possession, crumbling infrastructure - as well as the usual fucked-up relationships - all occupying a narrow emotional gamut: from the slightly bleak but hilarious to the despondent but mildly amusing. Guitar/vocals/computer/projection. A work in progress.
August 29th, 30th and 31st
8pm
Perry Hoberman is a installation and performance artist whose work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe. He works with a variety of technologies, ranging from the utterly obsolete to the seasonably state-of-the-art. Hoberman is an Associate Research Professor in the Interactive Media Division at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
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Saturday, August 23
6PM- 9PM
Spinteraction
A kinetic poetry performance by professional sign spinners
Created by Evelyn Serrano
****Performance followed by a sign spinning workshop****
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July 13th and 14th, 2008
Ronald Reagan Love Story
Created by Alison Heimstead and Shannon Scrofano
An excavation of the life of former president and unlikely cowboy Ronald Reagan. This mixed-media performance layers real, physical, and political landscapes into transformed media projections fused with puppet theater objects and effects.
A preview of what’s to come.
July 13th and 14th
8pm and 9:15 pm
Live Music between shows by Daniel Corral and guests
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Saturday, May 3, 2008
Christine Wertheim's
quoi
quoi is a dramatic exploration of the relationship between sound,
body, sense and voice, performed with two sock-puppets, seven jellyfish, one
blasted tree, two space-capsules and a balloon on a stick called
Nigel. May 3rd is its world premiere.
Christine Wertheim teaches feminisms, writing and theories of art at
the California Institute of the Arts. Her books are Seance (Make Now
Press, 2006), The Noulipian Analects (Les Figues Press, 2007,
co-edited with Matias Viegener), and +|'me'S-pace (Les Figues Press,
2007), a book of poetics. quoi is her dramatic debut.
Saturday, May 3rd
8PM and 9:30PM
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April 11-13th, 2008
Guest Artist Peter Yates presented:
RADIO RODIA
A solo puppet opera about creative impulses, compost, building codes and reincarnation.
Based on historical events, the work traces the lives of Simon Rodia – builder of the Watts Towers, reviled by bureaucrats as a hoarder of garbage, hailed by artists and scientists as a man of genius – and Tressa Prisbrey, who in order to shelter her collection of 17,000 pencils, built houses of bottles in her backyard, each with a unique pattern of shapes and colors, all glowing with the sun.
The inspired, lonely efforts of these brilliant folk artists propel a comic tale which slyly comments on our longings and aspirations, and the mixed receptions which they receive in the workaday worlds of the societies we live in. In celebration of the two artists’ obsessive visions, all media – music, theater, puppetry, painting, sculpture, poetry, photograpy – are put to use in this equally driven, layered opera of ideas.
Armed not only with various musical accomplishments, but also with the skills of furniture maker whose designs are as singular as his musical ones. The exuberant glee and energy with which he performed were like what me might get if Mozart came back and gave a one-man performance of The Marriage of Figaro by moonlight for a few friends. – LA Reader
Peter Yates is a composer and a guitarist. His work with the Elgart-Yates Guitar Duo, formed in 1975, includes recordings, duo-compositions, frequent performances in the U.S. and Europe, over one hundred premieres, and the publication of a book on prepared guitar. His compositions include two puppet operas, Radio Rodia and Motherlode about a gold rush ghost town in the Eastern Sierra. His comic-book oratorio, The Egg and the Seed, developed a new musical form using narrative graphics with sung text blocks and speech-balloons. His work has been supported by the California Arts Council, Meet the Composer, The Swiss Helvetica Fund, NEA Consortium Commissioning, and Italian and Mexican State Radio. He is on the faculties of music at Cal Poly Pomona and UCLA.
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March 6-22, 2008
Concrete Folk Variations
Chapter 1: Death of a Sugar Daddy
Life is bitter when the cop shop shuts down the candy store.
Written and Directed by Susan Simpson
Performed by Katie Shook, Beth Peterson and DanRae Wilson, J.P. Parr, Moira McDonald and Susan Simpson
Music by Marc Amoroso
Concrete Folk Variations is an epic urban folk tale et in the lesbian bars, cop shops and street carsof McCarthy Era L.A., A serial puppet drama that will be presented on a regular basis here at the Manual Archives. Look for new episodes in July 2008
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November 17,18th , 2007
Ironman
By Beth Peterson and One Grain of Sand Puppet Theater
Ironman is a tiny but mighty folk puppet show that explored the extraordinary life of San Fernando Valley’s Ironman, Ambrose Meyer: welder, horseshoe sculptor, and obsessive gardener of eccentric cacti.
Performed by: Jonathon Alvarez, Sibyl O’Malley and Ezra Peterson Behnen
Music by: Severin Behnen
*Further musical entertainment by:
TANGO NUEVO
Pictures of the work of the Ironman, Ambrose Meyer
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Saturday, September 29, 8PM
Sunday, October 7, 8PM
Leonard Cohen Opens the Sky
Folksinger Emily Lacy leads an interpretation of the works of Leonard
Cohen through performance, song, and image. Ms. Lacy will explore the
character of Cohen through a site-specific musical experiment within
the magically tiny, chapel-like theater of the Manual Archives. This
strand of theater represents the first of such work for the artist,
and comes after the recent completion of her 4th homemade album
"newsworthy new york tapes".
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Friday, September 28th, 2007
The Little Fakers fondly presented a sneak preview of
SUNSET CHRONICLES EPISODE 5
SUNSET CHRONICLES is a serial drama set on the eastern edge of Sunset Boulevard, with a cast consisting entirely of handmade marionettes. In each episode a band of hardy souls navigates an otherworldly Los Angeles, an uncanny cityscape of abandoned buildings, forgotten histories and real and surreal possibilities. Any resemblance between the puppets and actual Los Angeles residents is purely intentional. All episodes are self-contained -- tune in today! EPISODE 5: There's a drought on and our friends down on Sunset Boulevard are feeling more than a bit parched in this new climate of heat and thirst. Can Los Angeles and its puppet inhabitants live without water? What kinds of delirium, mirages and cosmic wanderings ensue when the cityscape becomes a desert? In our own heat-inflected late-summer delirium, the Little Fakers have decided this would be a good time for a Rock Opera, so that's what you'll get when you visit "Sunset Chronicles" at the ! Manual A rchives. Live Music. Singing Puppets.
THE LITTLE FAKERS is a collective of experimental puppet theater artists, sound artists, and writers working in the LA area. For the past three years they have performed their marionette serial The Noah Purifoy Art Environment, Beta Level, Il Coral and the Velaslavasay Panorama.
Episode 5 in its rock operatic entirety will be presented at The Velaslavasay Panorama in February — but in the meantime this sneak preview will pique your fancy for the adventures to come!
Live music by Gemmelica & Marshweed to follow each show!
Gemmelica & Marshweed play old songs and make up new ones on the viola, contrabass, banjo, and accordion.
Showtimes: 8PM, 9PM, and 10PM
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June 7-30, 2007
Lead Feet and Nothing Upstairs:
A History of the Lifelike
"Lead Feet and Nothing Upstairs: A History of the Lifelike, a piece that radicalizes and reinvents the notion of puppet theater" F. Kathleen Foley
Los Angeles Times
An original puppet play by Susan Simpson tracing the footsteps of The Ditto Sisters, identical triplet troubadors who enter the city of Los Angeles and set off a wave of architectural and perhaps human replication. A creation myth for our city, in which characters multiply and contract, and generations of artificial bodies mimic and interact with one another.
Written and Directed by Susan Simpson
Original Music by Emily Lacy and Eric Lindley
Costume Design by Sarah Brown
Lighting Design by Kristy Baltezore
Scenic Design by Susan Simpson and Alison Heimstead
Featuring Marsian De Lellis, Jackie Kay, Katie Shook, Kendra Ware. and Anne Yatco
