"The house is not a refuge from history. It is where history ends up." ~ Bill Bryson

Dear Friends and Supporters,

A lot has happened in the world since we last wrote. The post-election upheaval might tempt some to withdraw into the comfort of home, to seek refuge from the historic turmoil that looms. Processions follow the opposite trajectory, venturing outward into shared space in times of fear, confusion, and unraveling. Such gatherings – whether overtly political or not – break down the lines that divide public and private, spectacle and ritual, political and personal, life and art. Indeed, as Bill Bryson points out, the home is perhaps the most historically-loaded locus of our lives.

This year PAW has been exploring what happens when home and commons collide, specifically creating works around a variety of storied houses and domestic spaces. Curators of historic houses, tasked with preserving and isolating a particular moment in time, often grapple with the questions of how to impart contemporary vitality and relevance to a mission that requires stasis and continuity.

In projects at Miami’s Vizcaya Museum and Gardens and at the colonial-era Raynham Hall in Oyster Bay, NY, PAW used immersive performance, archival imagery, and collaborative spirit to spark new perspectives on old houses with radical legacies. Expanding our view from house to neighborhood, PAW created a procession for NY's Astor Place re-opening, exploring the counter-cultural impact of East Village denizens from Emma Goldman to Patti Smith. We led NY’s Village Halloween Parade back home with Reverie, launching a cloud of domestic objects in a Butoh-inspired exultation of the everyday. But in the end, PAW’s most exciting site-specific project took place in the most historic house of all. On October 31, we had the honor of performing at The White House for the Obamas’ annual Halloween extravaganza.

Amidst these new projects, PAW’s annual rites continued. We returned to Columbia University’s Miller Theater to create TraVerse for the 5th Annual Morningside Lights. We roamed Broadway with our Frost Giants for Winter’s Eve, convened a Parliament of Owls for Rhinebeck’s Sinterklaas, and began planning our return to the Italian Alps for our Midsummer Pageant Puppetry Workshop. As 2017 approaches, we are excited to become students ourselves, researching Balkan/Tyrolean/Swabian Carnival masquerades as artists-in-residence at the Kamov Residency in Rijeka, Croatia. (we'll keep you posted on our Carnival adventures via Facebook).

All of this work exists because of you – the thousand or more volunteers who joined our open workshops to build and perform– and the many others who support PAW with donations to keep our doors open and to keep public space alive with collective art.  We hope our paths will cross again in the coming year.

Alex and Sophia

For once, the White Rabbit was right on time. As President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama appeared at the South Portico of the White House, PAW's clockwork White Rabbits (from 2013's Tick Tock Halloween Parade) were there at attention, ready to greet the 5000 children and military service families assembled for the First Lady's annual trick-or-treating extravaganza.

The Wonderland-inspired Rabbits were part of a larger immersive performance, drawing on classics of children's literature and folklore. Joining other master puppeteers and circus performers, PAW's beloved Phoenix, glowing Frost Giants, and verdant, sinuous Jacks wandered the South Lawn, animated by students from the UNC School of the Arts, led by our amazing team of puppet directors: Rachael Shane, Brendan Regimbal, and Kate Brehm.

See more from PAW @ The White House . . .

PHOTO: Brendan Regimbal

PHOTO: Politico.com

PHOTO: David Almeida

In July, PAW was invited by Miami's Vizcaya Museum and Gardens to create Whirl, an immersive performance work that summoned the Carnivalesque spirit of Robert Chanler.

Vizcaya was built in 1916 by James Deering, scion of an industrialist fortune who sought to create a mythical waterfront retreat and home for his eclectic and growing collection of antiquities, classical sculptures, and American art. In 1920, Deering commissioned Chanler, an eccentric American Modernist muralist to create a bas-relief whirlpool mural that remains a defining feature of Vizcaya. Chanler was well known for creating other-worldly environments in sprawling murals and multi-paneled screens inspired by allegorical visions of the natural world. At Vizcaya, he found an ethos so replete with fantasy that it might have emerged from one of his paintings.

Playing at the intersection of the scenography, ritual theatre, and puppetry, Whirl deconstructed Chanler's densely composed screens and his tempestuous Vizcaya pool mural into a multi-layered experience involving illuminated puppets, mobile projections, and sound – all attuned to the background of particular Vizcaya locations. Drawing from Chanler's fertile bestiary, a series of space-specific tableaux vivants inhabited and migrated among selected corners of the grounds, allowing audience to meander through Vizcaya's space, gravitating toward a final convergence overlooking Biscayne Bay.

View video and images from Whirl ...

Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
Found my way upstairs and had a smoke,
Somebody spoke and I went into a dream
       ~ Lennon-McCartney,  "A Day in the Life"

One thinks of Halloween as a chance to fantasize, but more than anything Halloween lets us realize, letting us play ourselves and leave the rest of the year for sleepwalking. This year we led the 43rd Annual Village Halloween Parade with Reverie, inviting one and all to recreate their waking dreams. Deploying a raucus cloud of everyday objects – coffee mugs, watering cans, easy chairs, toilets – we evoked those moments the familiar seems suddenly strange; when a place, a word, an object encountered a thousand times before, pops precariously into our awareness, before retreating back into the hypnosis of the ordinary. In these moments of reverie, our eyes are fresh, a child's eyes. Unfettered by habit, ideas and inspirations swirl in, even as we are haunted by the feeling that the concrete world is but a waking dream, our own creation.

Familiar, yet eerily clad in white, our flotilla of performing objects glided on a cushion of ethereal lights, above a march of dark umbrellas. As chimes rung out, the umbrellas lowered one by one, revealing the awe-struck masquerade of Butoh-inspired children's faces looking skyward at the undimmed wonder of ordinary life, inviting one and all to reawaken to the world around us.

See images and video from Reverie . . .

PHOTO: Alex Kahn

We always welcome the chance to seed new community-based Halloween traditions wherever we can, but few locations seem as ripe for nocturnal mysteries as Oyster Bay's Raynam Hall, a farmhouse built in the 1740s whose owner, Robert Townsend led a successful spy ring during the Revolution. His family passed down the house and its stories for 200 years before it became a historic museum in 1953. Inspired by a treasure trove of family daguerrotypes from the Raynham Hall archives, PAW created a retinue of soaring silk spirits with the digitally-transferred faces of Townsend descendants, who returned to haunt the streets of Oyster Bay on October 29, for the 1st Annual Halloween Parade.

In September PAW was invited to help celebrate the remaking of Astor Place, one of NYC's most storied cultural hubs.

Inspired by the punk-era wheat-paste poster aesthetic, we led a week of puppetraisings in which local residents and students constructed and layered the 12 towering figures with over 1000 images, sampled from every chapter of East Village lore. Each puppet took on its own identity, as thematic figures emerged from the iconic people, places, and images that constituted a crucible of culture within a block or two of Astor Place.

It was as if the walls of CBGB had come to life. The figures ambled past Cooper Union flanked by replicas of Tony Rosenthal's spinning cube and flowing silk banners – impastoed with tantalizing fragments from Electric Circus and Pyramid Club; La Mama and the Public Theatre; pierogis and hamentashen; Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsburg, Leon Trotsky and Emma Goldman, Patti Smith, Klaus Nomi, and on and on…. The procession set off powered by the samba drums of Fogo Azul and led by the Hungry March Band. En route we were joined by local luminaries Bond Street Theatre and greeted with an explosive finale by Blue Man Group.

PHOTO: Karl Rabe

See the video created by volunteer Tim Sin....

PHOTO: The Arts Initiative Columbia University

" PAW's Morningside Lights workshop and parade was the most creative and magical experience I've had this year."

One can almost picture a winding procession of lanterns in Wallace Stevens' words, "the height emerging and its base / These lights may finally attain a pole / In the midmost midnight and find the serpent there." This September, PAW celebrated its 5th year of bringing illuminated art to Morningside Park with TraVerse, by evoking another sort of luminary. Marking 100 years of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, we invited makers and marchers to literally light their favorite passages from a century of timeless poets.

PAW returned to Columbia University's Miller Theatre to lead a week of collaborative workshops that produced 40 unique giant lanterns. Working in collaboration with Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the workshops coincided with an exhibition of original manuscripts by Pulitzer-winning poets. Drawing inspiration from poets ranging from Robert Frost to Tracy K Smith, participants embedded fragments of text into figments of imagination. It was fascinating to see our annual gathering of makers grapple, not just with wire and paper, but with the subtleties and overtones of an austere Robert Lowell phrase, a redemptive yet melancholy Ann Sexton line (left), or the double-edged wit of Theodore Roethke. The resulting procession formed a serpentine line of illuminated verse, ensconced in imagery, like a glowing beads on a thread of text.

Read the poems, see the lanterns, and learn more at morningside-lights.com.

As the seven Frost Giants careened around the corner of 65th Street and Broadway, striding as if in slow motion, we noticed something different in the crowd at this year's Winter's Eve Festival. A kid called out "They came back!" and we realized that for some the novelty of 14'-tall glowing crystalline figures had yielded to a sense a familiar anticipation, the ritual return of a ephemeral feature of the New York holiday landscape.

For three hours, in the seasoned hands of 21 deft and hearty puppeteers, the Giants glided, bowed, danced, high-fived, and improvised their circuitous way through a dense but welcoming crowd of 25,000 revelers.

See more images of the Frost Giants @ Winter's Eve. . .

Wisdom is found in unexpected places, but at a time when it seemed needed most, the Parliament of Owls was there, leading this year's Sinterklaas procession as the Honored Animal. With rotating heads, glowing eyes, and flowing magisterial plumage robes, the Owls led a retinue of a hundred mythic beasts, celestial objects, whimsical automata – all created or restored by PAW – along with gamelans, brass bands, pipers, shaggy Grumpuses, Wild Women, and Mexican Chinelos, and more.

Since its return to the streets of Rhinebeck in 2009, Sinterklaas, under the direction of Jeanne Fleming has provided an outsized Carnivalesque antidote to homogenous holiday celebrations, embracing a dazzling array of cultural expressions and edgy performances, and achieving the elusive true spirit of Christmas. In short, it was a hoot.

See more images from Sinterklaas...

Our Annual Pageant Puppetry Workshop and Midsummer Festa returns to the village of Morinesio. For the past decade, this unique event has used technical workshops in processional design as a means to delve into the oral histories, folklore, and agro-ecology of a remote alpine valley in Occitan Italy. When PAW began these workshops in 2002, Morinesio was a near-abandoned village with 6 full-time residents. Since then, Morinesio has continued to flourish as old houses and village structures have been restored, old rituals maintained, and a mix of international newcomers and ancestral Val Maira families have collaborated to keep the thousand-year-old village a living part of regional Occitan cultural resurgence.

The workshop covers basic techniques in large-scale positive mold-casting, bamboo-forming, puppet articulation and movement, and processional choreography. Classes take place amidst stunning mountain vistas, locally-grown gourmet meals, and an evening of traditional step-dancing with the locals, all culminating in a Midsummer Procession and all-night Festa.

Learn more or register for the workshop....

PHOTO: The High Line

Since November 8, charitable organizations have reported an unprecedented surge in donations, as people seek to channel their fear and dismay into concrete action to offset the effects of the incoming administration. While PAW does not directly combat climate change or lobby to protect voting rights, or fund relief to Syrian refugees, PAW does bring people together into the streets and give them the means to be visible, to convey a narrative, and to occupy and activate public space. Just being part of a collaborative workshop or neighborhood procession, live and in-person, is one hopeful antidote to the isolating toxins of viral news and the rhetoric of hate. As public demonstrations and civil actions get underway across the country, we are already corresponding with groups seeking to create visual elements for the Women's March in Washington on January 21, and we maintain a policy of advising and assisting groups to attain a potent visual presence.

While much of our funding comes directly from project sponsors, PAW remains a year-round organization (with year-round expenses) and we are always seeking new avenues for community-based human powered performance. Your donations help us devote time to research and develop new opportunities, while helping us get the word out about current projects. Donations help maintain our workshop, archive our works, and cover institutional costs. And they insure that staff artists and technicians are well supported, respected, and insured. We would like to thank all of you who have helped make these events fiscally sustainable. Whether or not you have before, please consider contributing to PAW today. We welcome your support at any level.

Send your contribution via PAW's secure Paypal server, or if you prefer, directly to Processional Arts Workshop, Inc. 90 La Bergerie Lane, Red Hook, NY 12571. PAW is a non-profit Federal tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, so all donations are tax-deductible to the full extent of the law.

FOLLOW PAW on FACEBOOK

500 people now follow PAW on Facebook. We post updates about projects, show sketches and images from works in progress, put out calls for spontaneous performance or workshop opportunities, and share links to Carnivalesque traditions and contemporary artists that have inspired us. We continue to send out newsletters and bulletins for major projects, but if you would like to track us more closely, we invite you to "Like" PAW's Facebook Page.  And make sure to turn "Notifications On" if you don't want to miss a post!