La MaMa Puppet Series

Wake Up You’re Dead

By Brooklyn Art Department (B.A.D.)

October 29 – November 7, 2010

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What puppeteer doesn’t wonder what will happen to him as he impersonates the creator?  In “Wake Up, You’re Dead!,” Aaron Haskell of Brooklyn Art Department, one of the original designers of Nightmare: NYC’s Haunted House, gives us a Halloween-flavored creation myth.  It’s performed as a dark ceremony by a weird tribe.  The Ancestors–Haskell’s own version of the Greek Titans–are life-sized skeleton creatures that create great balls of light (the life force).  Mankind is born by sliding down a Jungian sluice to the earth.  There are black light effects, dancing skeletons (that show the cyclical nature of life), primal movement (costumed creatures locomoting on all-fours, animal-like), bass-heavy loud music, Butoh and technical modern dance.  Puppets bring puppeteers to life and vice-versa.  Following this spectacle of evolution, an ultimate being is created at the end of the show.

It’s all staged as a De La Guarda-type event and spectacle:  a boisterous party that will have you on your feet!

Haskell has invented myths since childhood.  “It’s a cool way to make up your own stories, especially since you can also make up your own creatures.”  In “Wake Up, You’re Dead!,” they’re all constructed from eco-friendly, greenlist ingredients, including skeletons of sawdust and cardboard that look like bones dressed in cornflakes.

Directed by Aaron Haskell
Choreography by Aaron Haskell

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