Our Monkey Bars

Wow, PDM has been up to a lot. We performed our duo chain act for the Sand by the Ton Party, three sets throughout the evening, in the VIP lounge opposite the giant steamboat hung from a crane bar. It was tons of fun and we're really glad we did it.

After building our chain pain tolerance level to a tremendous amount, we realized it's time to focus on another one of the the apparatus that will be a part of our full length show, now titled Cloud De'lite. We came to this decision for many reasons....we decided to have our monkey bars fabricated and focus on building this horizontal ladder / monkey bar piece.

If anyone needs a metal fabricator, we have a great reference for you. Evan, the welder who made our ladder, is freaking awesome. He did such an amazing job, it is beautiful and safe!

We are having SOOOOOO much fun building this piece. There are really infinite possibilities on this thing, endless doubles moves, options for space and isolation while being on the same apparatus, theatrical images, and dynamic movements. We're drawing on the expertise and generosity of our community, which consists of so many amazing artists that all have something priceless to add to our process.

We will be showing the first draft of this monkey bar piece at the one year anniversary show at The Athletic Playground on Oct. 3rd and 4th. Come and see! Some other performance gigs are in the works, we'll let you know as they arise.

Site specific performance

The Paper Doll Militia is going to be performing high on Epiphany...Literally. We are so excited to have the honor of creating a site-specific performance piece on the epic metal sculpture entitled Epiphany. You may have seen this beautiful woman, with chains for hair, at burning man. She is one of the three of the figures from "Crude Awakening," a massive collaboration created for the Burning Man event in 2007. These sculptures are designed to be lit on fire, and of course we won't have them lit during our performance, but we're hoping to get totally covered in soot. We'll be hanging our chains off her outstretched hands, working with the theme of the Goddess and the Grotesque.

This performance will be at the Sand by the Ton Party (http://www.thebigartexperience.com/) at The American Steel warehouse in West Oakland.

saturday, july 11
4pm 'til late
at american steel
1960 mandela parkway
oakland, CA

Our Storyboard

With thought threads floating around in our minds, we started getting lost in all the details of our piece. So in order to get it out of our heads and into the world to look at it, we started making our storyboard. We needed the parts of the piece to be easily moved since we don't know the order yet and so now they are floating in the air strung up on a clothesline. This is our favorite new way to brainstorm and storyboard! We write thoughts and draw pictures, and pin them up carefully on the line. Our story, our town, and our characters suddenly become more real. Editing becomes a simple matter of plucking a slip of paper that no longer belongs, and placing it in the shoebox of ideas, perhaps to reemerge some day in some future form or project. Isn't art fun?!

The Magical Door

After a weekend of watching circus and physical theater shows, research, we went to Golden Gate park to lie in the grass and enjoy the last bits of sunlight on the longest day of the year. It was Summer Solstice and we knew that we should have some kind of ceremony. Spending hours a week dreaming up our storyline for a magical tale we decided we needed to have a symbolic, magical quest to celebrate solstice. We needed to the unlock wisdom of children playing. So we found the most enthralling playground to explore and discovered a new adventure. We developed the quest....make a key out of cardboard ( one of the materials in the landscape of our piece) and find the magical door to unlock. Like children, we committed to the imaginary world we created; our notions of age and time fell away.

The Playground

With the sun shining in Oakland we looked inside at our practice space cringing at being indoors on such a beautiful day. Well, our scene for the piece is a playground, so we decided to do some field research and check out different monkey bars on playgrounds around Oakland. We've been spotting them for a while and Rain saw one this week that looked pretty good- regular solid steel free standing on a school playground just a few blocks from our practice space. The empty playground waited for us and tossing our shoes aside we improved and experimented with shape and movement and talked about the design that we're going to use for our own piece.

A bell rang and a bunch of kids exited the school and sat on picnic tables nearby eating their lunch and looking over at us. After their sandwich and apple sauce they scampered over to us with looks of bewilderment on their faces. "What are you doing here? Who are you? Are you working" Small questioning voices surrounded us. Our response "We're playing" was met by even further concern. "Adults don't play, they have work to do." "Really, your parents don't play?" "No. They work all day and then they're too tired." Then from the group one girl climbed up on the bars with us. Looking into our eyes she frankly stated. "Adults have inner children too, but they lock it up inside because there's too much work to do."

exactly

As we were leaving one of the kids ased again who we were. We exchanged looks. Rain laughed and said, "We're kooks." The kid responds, "Oh, you're in the circus."