BAGABONES
From primal spaces, to final spaces, and places in between, Jonathan transforms and transports himself and the audience through this theatrically new “Performemoirt” piece: Performance+Memoir+Art.
BAGABONES presents the deaths and reincarnations of a man through a single life journey: the business man, the transcendent, the academic, the street performer, and the ascendant spirit.
The multiple roles are played by Nosan and four ordinary objects: a six foot tall wood cubicle, a desk, a small coffin, and a ceramic vessel. Just like his own body, the objects are manipulated from one reality to another as perspectives constantly alter--extreme pain turns to ecstatic pleasure, confinements bring escape, heaven mingles with hell.
Each scene incorporates the ceramic forms which Nosan creates per show, and each life scene results in a visual and tonal flatlining--destruction brings creation and beginnings result from an end.
Premiered NY Fringe Festival 2010, La Mama NYC
notes:
Mumma Minnie, my great grandmother, told stories of traveling circuses with dancing bears that came to her village in Iasi (Romania/Moldavia depending on the season). Dancing Bears never left my mind. When I was 20 I saw a Dancing Bear at the Bolshoi Circus in Moscow after taking the Trans-Siberian home after street performing at a Nagasaki Exposition. The bears were just as I imagined. Dancing. Trained well, the bears danced, apparently naturally and joyfully.
I saw my first contortionist during the Nagasaki Expo--a little lithe Chinese girl balancing countless little cups of water on stacked trays from every appendage. At the same time I met my first yoga practitioner--Bruce the One Man Band from Australia who traveled the globe onemanbanding. Control and balance was the common factor--mentally and physically.
I have an attraction to extremism and esotericism. Diving deep into subjects and sourcing nuggets of hidden gems of knowledge, philosophies, Beauties in light and darkness.
BAGABONES is change and development, fixed forms breathing new life asperspectives alter, and a gift and receipt.
Breaking the desire to contain and define.
Breaking the attraction to control a form, allowing the form to transform and evolve.
Breaking the singular confinement to allow many pieces to many people.
What do you see and what do I see?
What time is it?
What are we carrying?
What space cultivates love or madness?
What transports us to our next level?
Creation demands destruction--of past ways, ways no longer working, no longer necessary. It is the shedding of the skin like a snake. There is no growth without the removal of the old container.
My Nana, Mumma Minnie’s daughter, said we live five lives if we’re lucky. This I just learned from my Mom, years after Nana’s passing. It is our duty to evolve. In this life and those to come.
