Avalanche of No
A solo theatrical performance highlighting an actors driving ambition to play Macbeth, Shakespeare’s man of ambition, par excellence. Complicating factor: the actor happens to be black.
33 years ago, Jeffrey Cousar witnessed the great Andre Braugher play Macbeth at the Philadelphia Drama Guild. He has been gripped by a desire to perform the role ever since. This drive has endured through thick and thin, through ups and downs, weathering the obstacles many encounter on an artistic journey. Braugher died in 2023. Therefore, Cousar now feels compelled to jump the life to come, as Macbeth puts it. Now or never.
Combining Shakespeare’s language with events from Cousars picaresque life, with its absurd calamities and unexpected glories, Avalanche of No will interweave DJ culture, the life of a real-life porter, custody battles, physicalized images of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and 3-card monte into a frank display of bravura storytelling. It will lead audiences into a confrontation of dream with reality, of destiny with real-world circumstance, all filtered through a lens of Afropessimism – experienced by many, recognizable by all. Finally, Cousar plays some of Macbeth, enough to reflect on the Scottish King as a brother of sorts, victim to the fickle mechanisms of destiny.
Funding for Avalanche of No was provided by the Wyncote Foundation and the Philadelphia Cultural Fund.
Liftup Oversounding
Liftup Oversounding is a peripatetic performance project that presents emergent, hypnotic, healing music for free along waterways in natural areas, creating a communal confluence of place, sound, setting, and ceremony to pry open a portal reuniting the inner self and the natural world through Music.
This is about LIFE – living music in the living world – and it is a GIFT.
Funding for Liftup Oversounding was provided by the Awesome Foundation and the Neighborhood Arts Program.
707 Hazardous Moves
A veteran experimental theater director takes to the stage with words, moves, and compulsive counting to expose his obsessive love affair with a poem that gives zero love in return.
Whit MacLaughlin throws caution to the wind. He fell painfully in love with Stéphane Mallarmé’s puzzling poem A Throw of Dice Will Never Abolish Chance (1897) over a decade ago. Seeking answers to this mysterious affliction, he traveled to France to sit at the feet of enigmatic philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, invented an unpredictable sport crossing sumo with jousting, took a bullet in a street mugging, gave up theater, returned to theatre to create an audience hallucination in Turkey, and finally, after an OCD diagnosis, failed to stage the poem in multiple attempts. In 707 Hazardous Moves, MacLaughlin, all by himself and in his 70th year, details why he gives such an enduring f**k about such a strange old poem.
Updated with new anecdotes relating to the cosmic nature of chance.
Funding for 707 Hazardous Moves was provided by the Wyncote Foundation and the Philadelphia Cultural Fund.
How To Get To The River
Produced in collaboration with the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, How To Get To The River was an experiential exhibition, an art-based adventure walk from the Academy on Philadelphia’s Logan Square, down Cherry Street to the Schuylkill River. It imbued participants with a deeper understanding of – and personal connection to – a watershed. Through elements of sight, sound, and somatic immersion, along with a variety of narrative and poetic art engagements, participants experienced “watershed thinking”. This live and alive art/science collaboration incorporated a living neighborhood into public art and played hide-and-seek.
Major Support for “How To Get To The River” was provided by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage with additional funding provided by the Wyncote Foundation and the Philadelphia Cultural Fund.
Gumshoe
Gumshoe was an immersive theatrical adventure in detection.
It connected two rare-book exhibitions: at the Free Library of Philadelphia and at the Rosenbach Museum and Library. At the center of the experience was a mystery that the audience was invited to investigate. Audiences had many ways to enter
the experience, and were able to customize their journey according to their level of interest and how much time they wished to spend. Both libraries hosted aspects of the experience, and were connected by a phone-delivered resolution to the mysteries that extended out into the city at large.
Major Support for “How To Get To The River” was provided by the William Penn Foundation with additional funding provided by the Wyncote Foundation and the Philadelphia Cultural Fund.
