Sunday, June 3rd: Teatro Delle Maschere in Somerville

Just in case you have to miss Teatro delle Maschere's performance at the Cambridge River Festival on Saturday, there is still a another chance to see us this weekend as we will be performing at the SomerStreets Carnaval in East Somerville on Louie's Stage by Foss Park at 3:15pm (Map)

As mentioned previously: we will be performing with new masks designed and sculpted by Eric Bornstein of Behind the Mask Studio & Theatre!

This Weekend: Open Air Circus in Space

This is my seventh summer teaching at the Somerville-based youth-circus, Open Air Circus. My mime and commedia dell'arte students will be performing alongside jugglers, unicyclists, stiltwalkers, and other assorted young performers, in Nunziato Field in Somerville, MA.

Show times are Friday, August 5th at 7pm, Saturday, August 6th at 2pm and 7pm, and Sunday August 7th at 2pm. Suggested donation is $3.

The theme is "OpenAir Circus in Space" and yes, there will be a commedia dell'arte scenario about the solar system.

Copley Square Farmers' Market, 2003

This is an excerpt from Spaces/Places: Voiced Reflections a program presented by Somerville Community Access Television in 2003 to coincide with The Windows Art Project. Lisa Smith produced and Doug Holder was the host.

My piece, Copley Square Farmers' Market, which was originally published in Poesy Magazine, comes in at about 1:30. Because there was a long line of presenters who were mostly reading from the page, the studio was set up in such a manner that I had to modify what was then my performance style to be done from a seated position (yes, that's a green screen in the background.)

Thanks to Chad Parenteau for uploading this. Chad gives a strong reading in this clip.

Open Air Circus, August 1-3 in Somerville, MA

My mime and commedia dell'arte students will be performing this weekend as part of Open Air Circus' 23rd annual show.

The performances climax 6 weeks of summer classes for the youthful performers.

All shows are are in Nunziato Field in Union Square, Somerville.


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This year's theme is "The British Invasion," a tribute both to Union Square's historical role as the site where George Washington took command of the Continental Army, as well as the British rock music of the 1960s.

Showtimes:

Friday, August 1st @ 7pm
Saturday, August 2nd @ 2pm
Saturday, August 2nd @ 7pm
Sunday, August 3rd @ 2pm

Suggested donation is $3.

February 9th: An evening of mime, poetry and masks at Willoughby and Baltic

On February 9th at 8pm I'll be performing an evening's worth of original work at Willoughby and Baltic in Davis Square.

The show will include mime, mime and poetry compositions, and a one man commedia dell'arte scenario inspired by Dario Fo's performance of the classic lazzo "the starving zanni."

Willoughby and Baltic
195g Elm Street
Somerville, MA
617-501-0197

$7

Willoughby and Baltic is in the alley between Benjapon's and Subway Sandwich Shop on Elm Street, just follow the dots!



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Meredith Garniss Interview

I do so digg an interview where I am the answer to the question. The interviewer was Pagan Kennedy and the interviewee was Meredith Garniss, painter, puppeteer, engineer and head honcho of Willoughby & Baltic, an automata and art gallery and marionette theatre where I performed this past July and where the ill-fated production of Macbeth rehearsed.

In the Ideas Section of The Boston Sunday Globe, Kennedy asks Garniss:

I hear you also became the home to one of the world's only "talking mimes."

To which Garniss responds:

The talking mime [who] performed in the gallery this summer was Ian Thal. He's multitalented and does mime, dance, poetry, and puppetry. I think it's OK if the mime talks as long as he leaves the audience speechless.

Garniss has a lot to say about running an art space, combining engineering with art, and working with artists of many media.

I already covered the issue of "talking mimes" with my students in Gloucester but I take issue with the idea that I am "one of the world's only"-- there are plenty of mimes whose work is against the stereotype-- and most of us are chatterboxes off-stage.

Willoughby & Baltic is hosting the Dorkbot Haunted Parlor this Halloween week at 195g Elm Street, Somerville, MA in Davis Square.

Teaching Commedia at the Open Air Circus

Click here for the full photo set

As I was preparing to teach another summer at Open Air Circus I thought back the past year's experience performing with i Sebastiani I lobbied to teach a class in commedia dell'arte as well as mime.

This quickly led to a problem, most of the children who gravitate to my classes have been girls, and traditionally, the masked characters of commedia have been male with actresses playing unmasked (and thus, less grotesque) female characters. I puzzled over how to give my girls the opportunity to play masks. I thought back to this past November when I saw Plunket & Tremolo, featuring Mark Jaster and Sabrina Mandell, perform commedia. In their show, Mandell took on a mask to play Smeraldina, a cook. portraying her as something of an older, craftier version of the Franchescina character we often use in i Sebastiani, I realized that there was nothing wrong with creating a mask for a female character if the mask was appropriate to the character. In addition, since we are all taught that the theatre of the English renaissance featured boy-actors playing women, there was no reason not to cast girl-actors as men. Once I solved those two problems, I was left only with the girls' willingness to play male masks.

So I began work on sculpting the masks from papier-mâché-- I was fortunate to discover that my skills had developed significantly since I last worked in that medium, and by the first day of class, I had masks for Arlecchino, Il Capitano, Il Dottore, and Pantalone. My class comprised of five girls and while I got a great deal of laughs from my depiction of Isabella as I introduced the characters, I decided, that owing to the age group, to dispense with the romance subplots. The girls all had an immediate sense of the vecchi, Dottore and Pantalone, and quickly came up with a lot of good verbal lazzi. The girls seemed to have a great deal of fun lampooning foolish men.

I went home and began work on a Franchescina mask-- reasoning that I wanted it to cover less of the face than most commedia masks and to have both the furrowed brow of a hard working zannia as well as some seemingly delicate features one would attribute to a young commedia heroine.

Over the next few weeks, I led them through exercises in projecting their voices, walking like the different characters, basic slapstick, and playing out brief character scenes in which they would all take turns playing the different masks. I encouraged them to borrow each other's jokes (including mine.) During this time, I began wondering what character I would play and if I could come up with a brief scenario that could use all of the characters and stay within the allotted time.

Eventually, I settled upon the character of Zanni, one of the very oldest of commedia characters-- whose name, a diminitive of "Giovanni", has become the generic label for all the servant characters as well as the origin of the word "zany". Zanni is a porter, and so, because of the relative size of the actors, Zanni could carry any of the other characters on his back. I described him as Arlecchino's uncle, and one of the girls, very intuitively corrected me with "No, Zanni is like Arlecchino's great-great-grandfather!"

I came up with the scenario during the final week of rehearsals, borrowing two elements from the scenario Michael McAfee dreamed up for the i Sebastiani anti-Masque we performed for Vision of the Twelve Goddesses: that Pantalone is staging a theatrical event in the hope of raking in the ducats and that Il Capitano wants to be the star of the show.

In this scenario, however, Pantalone is the producer for the circus. We have a series of lazzi in which Zanni is misidentified as a steed (by Pantalone as a horse, Il Dottore as an elephant, and Il Capitano as a giraffe, and Arlecchino as whatever anyone else says) and repeatedly ridden around, as Il Dottore lobbies for a more gourmet menu at the concession stand (more work for Franchescina, and more confusion for Arlecchino,) Il Dottore misdiagnosing Il Capitano as a corpse, Capitano swearing vengeance on Il Dottore and Pantalone, Franchescina standing up to Il Capitano, and Arlecchino and Franchescina riding off stage on Zanni's back.

One rather funny mistake: on the last performance, the performers playing Franchescina and Arlecchino, instead of climbing onto my back at the end, somehow both leapfrogged right over me, but there are no mistakes: incorporate it into the next show!

Now: to dream up a scenario for next year.

See more photographs on my flickr account.

An evening with Ian Thal and the String Theory Marionettes @ Willoughby and Baltic

I'll be performing an evening of my original work, which incorporates poetry, mime, and and theatrical clowning, at Willoughby and Baltic on Saturday, July 21st. Also appearing will be the String Theory Marionettes who will be performing in the Teeny Lounge. The marionettes will be joined by the voice of Jimmy Tingle.

Coffee, chocolates, and mocktails will be available at the refreshment stand. Show starts at 8pm. Admission is $5

Willoughby & Baltic
195g Elm Street
Davis Square
Somerville, MA 02144
617-501-0197

Rehearsals begin for Macbeth

Last night a large group of actors whose heads I forgot to count met crowded into the Somerville art space, Willoughby and Baltic, a former ambulance garage converted into an art gallery and marionette theatre, and sat down along a long train of café tables. It was first time the full cast of the Lallygagging Players' production of Macbeth met to rehearse. Our director and producer, David Letendre and Brigid Battell (who is also playing Lady Macbeth) introduced the concept, unlike most productions of Shakespeare's plays, we are working directly from the unmodernized text of the first folio with close attention to the scansion of the original text and its eccentric spelling conventions of the early seventeenth century. That so close attention is being paid to Shakespeare's poetic language adds to my confidence in a production that is to be staged in such a non-traditional venue with a new company. (Of course both Letendre and Battell have already been active in local theatre, directing and acting in numerous plays in more traditional venues with other theatre companies.)

I am playing the characters of the Captain who recounts Macbeth's victory over MacDonwald and King Sweno, the Old Man who first speaks of such perversions of nature as horses eating one another, a number of unnamed Lords, and Seyton, Macbeth's aid in the final act. These are my first roles in a Shakespeare play-- something I had been actively working towards this past year. (I auditoned with Sonnet 28-- which I had recited at the Shakespeare Sonnet-athon his past April.)

Interestingly enough it's not my first time this year involved with some piece of theatre that originally served as political propaganda for the reign of King James I of England and Scotland as earlier this year i Sebastiani had performed an anti-masque to Samuel Daniel's court-masque, The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses.

Letter in the Literary Review of Canada

The Literary Review of Canada printed my letter to the editor regarding last month's publication of The Explanation We Never Heard an apologia by Shriaz Dossa, a professor at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada who has come under criticism for being the sole Canadian scholar to have attended the "International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust" in Tehran, Iran, a conference that included a great many holocaust deniers, anti-Semites, and non-academics.

I found Professor Dossa's defense of the conference and his attendance so sophistic, and so intellectually dishonest that I felt compelled to write the following letter (also available on the LRC's website):

To The Editor:

Professor Dossa’s excuses regarding his attendance of the December 2006 “International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust” demonstrate poor scholarship and faulty logic. Even if we accept his claim that only 6 out of 33 presenters were Holocaust deniers, then that means that at a supposedly academic conference, roughly 19 percent of the presenters were deniers. It would be unacceptable for a major academic conference on Darwin to have 19 percent of the presenters advocate creationism—were this the case, the conference organizers’ commitment to science itself would be questioned.

Dossa also misuses the word “anti-Semitism”—the word was specifically coined by 19th-century Germans who wanted to describe their hatred of Jews in racial (or pseudoscientific) terms as opposed to theological terms. It was never used to describe hatred of Muslims. Indeed, the Nazi regime even openly recruited aid from the Muslim world in its final solution.

Dossa also claims that anti-Semitism is an exclusively western problem. Policies of humiliating and subjugating Jews had been common in many (though not all) nations and eras of the Islamic world. These humiliations were, for the most part, not as severe as what occurred in Christian Europe, and at some points—notably in al-Andalus—Jews had great liberty. Nevertheless, Muslim countries (most significantly in the Arab world) adopted many elements of western anti-Semitism in the 19th and 20th centuries—first from Christian missionaries and later through Nazis and neo-Nazis.

Furthermore, a “spiritual wish” by a head of state for the elimination of the Jewish state is hardly without significance. It is the practice of Holocaust deniers to claim that Hitler did not intend to murder Jews because his public statements regarding the fate of the Jews were always in terms of prophecy and not policy.

I suppose Dossa has learnt something from the conference.

Ian Thal
Somerville, Massachusetts

Visit the LRC website for other letters discussing Professor Dossa's statements.

[As a note, this is the second time this year I have had a letter to the editor published-- last time was to criticize a production of playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis' The Last Days of Judas Iscariot.]

I play four characters because I'm such a character

I've just been cast in the Lallygagging Players' production of Macbeth which will be presented at Willoughy and Baltic on August 17, 18, 19, 24 and 25 in Somerville, Massachusetts. That is all for now.

Re: Should Somerville Have a Poet Laureate?

After some debate over whether such a position should exist in the first place, Allen Bramhall has declared himself Poet Laureate of Boston. Across the river, Cambridge is also toying with the idea. While here in Somerville, Doug Holder has begun to campaign for Somerville to have its own Poet Laureate on both his blog and his column in The Somerville News.

[Note: the fellow pictured in Holder's blog is not a 'villen at all, but a Briton named Luke Wright.]

Holder quotes me as saying:

Ian Thal (Poet/Mime/Performer): “The question should be: ‘Would having a poet laureate serve Somerville in a manner that the Somerville Arts Council does not already?’ The Somerville Arts Council does a better job than most cities in Massachusetts supporting the arts/artists (certainly better than Boston). The laureate position should add something to what is already there.”

Just to clarify my statements: Outside of the experience of having my poems in Boston City Hall (the poems were written and submitted while I still resided in Boston), I have found that most of the support I have received for my art inside of Boston has been from artist-run organizations like Mobius or Artists at Large, Inc. while the Cambridge Arts Council and the Somerville Arts Council are very visible in the community, the result being a friendlier and supportive environment for artists relative to the situation on the other side of the river. My experience of Brookline, Cambridge, Somerville are school systems in which the arts are integrated into the curriculum, while in Boston, arts education exists only at the discretion of visionary administrators at specific schools.

The point being that anything Boston might do to raise the status of any art form would be a great improvement while Somerville's proposed laureate position should come with a mandate to further enhance Somerville's efforts.

May 17th: "I Refused to Die" Reading at McIntyre and Moore

On the evening of May 17th, after my stroll through Boston City Hall, I attended a reading for Susie Davidson's anthology, I Refused to Die at McIntyre & Moore Booksellers in Davis Square. The book is a collection of essays oral histories by Holocaust survivors and camp liberators living in the Boston metropolitan area.

Typically, Davidson's appearances are with Kovno ghetto survivor, Rosian Zerner, and Dachau camp liberator, Cranston "Chan" Rogers. Zerner was unable to attend that evening and Rogers was running late, so Davidson spent time describing the process of putting together the book, (which included a cross country trip on a Greyhound bus to organize her assembled notes without the distraction of home) and read excerpts from the tales of other survivors. In addition, as the book also includes contributions from local poets, she asked Rafael Woolf and me to read. Woolf's poem was a polemic directed at Holocaust denier, Bradley Smith.

Because there are so many accounts of great literary merit written by actual survivors and I am not a trained historian, I have thus far avoided writing directly on the subject, but this sublimation appears to manifests itself in confronting theological anti-Judaism, exposing Holocaust denial, such as the play I am currently developing. Somehow, in the process, I've also written a couple of poems.

The first, "Numbers" is one I wrote because I had been invited to participate in a poetry reading at The New England Holocaust Memorial for no particular reason beyond the fact that I am Jewish. It was in memory of a cousin of mine who had survived Auschwitz-Birkenau. I long considered it an act of pretentiousness on my part, so I read it so infrequently, but editors keep asking permission to reprint it, so I must be the one in error. The second is entitled "Metathesis of the Books" and was inspired by a series of paintings by Samuel Bak, a child survivor of the Vilna ghetto, whose allegorical works have inspired me for many years.

Chan Rogers, a native of Florida, arrived and spoke informally in a gravelly Southern accent about his experiences as a sergeant in the 45th Infantry Division often taking questions. After the war, he went on to study at MIT and became a civil engineer who designed many features in the Boston area including the Cambridge Street underpass that goes under the Harvard University campus. He explained that he and other veterans never spoke much about their World War II experiences for years since after the war, so many of them ended up going to school and working with other men who had had similar experiences, and it was a matter of passing these stories on to other generations that has caused him to speak.

Rogers spoke of April 29, 1945, the day when 45th Thunderbird Division entered the Dachau concentration camp by way of a railroad bridge after a surrender had been arranged by the Red Cross. (In 2001 I was present to hear a friendly disagreement between a veteran of the 45th and one from the 42nd Rainbow Division over whose division was the first into Dachau as the 42nd had entered the camp from the other direction.) Rogers explained that while he had already seen much carnage already in the war, he was unprepared for Dachau, having only been told that it was a prison where "Hitler kept his enemies." Senior SS officers had abandoned the camp in advance of the surrender, leaving their underlings to be captured by advancing American forces.

He also made mention of the Dachau massacre that occurred that day after troops from both the 45th and 42nd discovered not only the starvation, disease, and overcrowding of the 32,000 prisoners, but thousands of corpses, including the 39 rail cars each filled with over 100 bodies. Rogers' own research indicates that trains had come from the Buchenwald concentration camp and that the prisoners had died primarily of starvation having been shipped out without food in advance of American troops who liberated the camp on April 11th. The Dachau massacre resulted in the death of 35 captured SS "Death's Head" guards, for which several American soldiers faced court-martial, though General Patton decided they deserved no further punishment.

Rogers made a number of parallels to current events, most notably the recent Holocaust denial conference hosted by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, noting that the deniers' agenda in this particular was clearly to de-legitimize Israel's right to exist.

Given the informality of the event Rogers also recounted a number of anecdotes, including an encounter with the daughter of German-American Bund leader, Fritz Kuhn, who taunted Rogers and his troops with threats that the German Army would return to rout the Americans out. He grinned as he quipped, "That never happened."

Reading Poetry on the Trolley

Your flamboyant author. (All photography by Gloria Mindock.)

Sunday, May 6, 2007:

I arrived a few minutes before 3:00pm in front of the Davis Square T-Stop to catch the trolley on which I planned to read. This, however, would be the day when the trolley would be ahead of schedule and so I missed it, leaving me unable to read with Carolyn Gregory as previously announced. So instead, I sat on a concrete pylon dressed rather flamboyantly and waited another half-hour for the next trolley.

As an aficianado of rail travel, I should note that "trolley" is a misnomer here. The vehicle in question is a sightseeing bus rented by the City of Somerville to ferry people about during Somerville Open Studios. The upper body is styled like a trolley of the late 19th and 20th century, made of wood and wrought metal as street cars were before the PPC Streetcar became widely used. A proper trolley is light rail car that is powered by electricity from overhead cables. I last rode a genuine pre-PPC trolley back in 2005.

Due to the fact that I was terribly conspicuous, people kept expecting me to be passing out maps. Apparently, in a city where George Washington first took command of the Continental Army, anyone dressed in a facsimile of 18th century garb must be involved in the tourist industry. The fact is that I had been to a yard sale the week before, and just as I was buying a copy of The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: Krapp's Last Tape (Beckett wasn't using them anymore) I looked up and said "what an extraordinary coat!" Normally I am immune to impulse purchases, but I fell in love with the full costume of a flamboyant 18th century pirate. (The tricorner hat was too large and the long coat was too opulent for a mere colonial.) Needless to say, that I had to wear it that day, though I added a sweater because I felt a cold coming on.

At 3:35pm the next "trolley" pulled up. On board were Timothy Gager, Dick Lourie and Gloria Mindock of Červená Barva Press who had organized the readings. I asked to read with them, and so Tim, Dick, and I played read a round robin, passing the microphone in between poems. Tim, I have known for a while as a short story writer and poet, but Dick was someone I knew only by reputation as both a poet and blues musician. Gloria was present mostly as the organizer and an audience member. Tim took the role of master of ceremonies.

Enough of the poems I had selected had to deal with trains and subways, that Russ, our driver, asked me if I had ever worked as a conductor.



Ian with Tom Daley and Russ

Tim and Dick debarked at Union Square, to be replaced by Tom Daley and Luke Salisbury. Tom, as well as being a poet I admire, is a fellow curmudgeon who is sometimes the subject of derision in our poetry community because he wants to read good poetry. Luke mostly read from his novel, Hollywood and Sunset, a picturesque novel about the early film industry.



Ian and Luke Salisbury, reading from Hollywood and Sunset

About an hour later I was in Davis Square again-- and two and a half hours after that I would be at a theatre audition.

More photos from the event can be seen here

May 5th and 6th: Poetry on a Somerville Trolley

In coordination with Somerville Open Studios, Gloria Mindock of Červená Barva Press has organized a poetry reading on a trolley that will connect Davis Square with the future Medford Street Station in Somerville, in honor of the future Green Line Trolley extention. Readings and the Trolley will run noon to 6pm on May 5th and 6th. I will be reading on the trolley leaving Davis Square at 3pm on Sunday, May 6th with Carolyn Gregory. Click here for a full schedule of poets and trolleys!