I was asked by Rachel Kramer Bussel to read at the annual Rainbow Book Fair at The Center today.

I love doing readings because I am a big old ham, and wondered what I could pick to fit the bill (a very SHORT bill: 5 minutes per reader).

I have no problem with short readings: I've written a 1-minute play, done a 2-minute reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, had a 5-minute play produced in Oregon, have written innumerable 10-minute plays, and my own reading series has a 15-minutes-tops limit.

The question was how best to create a literary amuse bouche (that would also sell books).

While I am not a poet, I have read and heard enough poetry that I can fake it (which I once did at Cheryl B's "Poetry vs. Comedy" series).

So I decided to make a found poem out of all the stories in BLE.

(Later, when I was talking to poet Guillermo Castro, who will read at Drunken! Careening! Writers! in April for National Poetry Month, he told me there is a form called a "cento," that is, a poem created solely from lines by other poets.)

So here's the cento for Best Lesbian Erotica 2011:
Best Lesbian Erotica 2011 (abridged)
I picked up a twentysomething-year-old Jewish straight girl when I went out for Chinese with my manager last Saturday night.

Van didn’t mind Julia being a stripper, as long as she didn’t have to go and watch her lover being watched.

“Why not? We girls do that all the time. I was a runner-up in my village in the boobs and butts contest.”
 
There is something very raw and very queer about playing with this kind of power.

“Okay, well, it goes both ways then. If I share, you have to, too.”

Aryn closed her eyes, sliding her hands around the muscled back and holding the dancer’s smooth body close, the hard nipple still hot against her tongue, and then Phera pulled back with a whispered laugh and took her body away.

I should be faster, this should be just three thrusts and it’s over, we’re in public, for goodness’ sake, in a room full of people, barely concealed by shadow.

In front of me stood a concrete hut, long abandoned, covered in DANGER OF DEATH signs.

Bella stood there, naked and blue.

Were I to describe my image of perfection, my ideal woman, I would list every one of her stunning features.

What I’d like would probably embarrass you, I thought.

“Just keep your mind on business, Ace, and let me do my work here,” I said.

“Do you want to see my tit?” Trish asks, just like she was asking “Do you want to see my puppy?”

Chen picked up my hand and examined my fingernails, which had black polish but were cut short.

I was all tangled up in my harness and I could barely move, so she could have been bright blue with tentacles and I would have been overjoyed to see her.

I felt a surge of irritation and slapped her with all my strength.

“Be good and you’ll get more,” Frankie promised.

There, in a dingy midafternoon bar, she ordered two double whiskies for herself and another to go with my coffee.

That’s how we ended up in this big abandoned room, with nice cushy chairs around a huge conference table.

So I had to be content to look at her and admire her from afar.

She crawls over me and doesn’t make a sound as she pushes my thighs apart.

The front wall of the Verizon Hall on the Commonwealth Plaza at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia is 90 feet tall; it would be a great, huge stage…if only it were horizontal. And yet, that’s not a problem for Grounded Aerial, a Brooklyn-based troupe which will perform “Chance Encounters” as part of the opening gala of the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts on April 7.

Using carefully rigged harnesses, performers who are trained dancers and aerialists will scurry and fly up and down walls, both ignoring and using the law of gravity to create their work. “Chance Encounters” is a site-specific piece created specifically for PIFA by Grounded Aerial founder and Artistic Director Karen Fuhrman.

Fuhrman was teaching a workshop at the Philadelphia Circus School of the Arts, (which is also presenting a show, The Green Fairy Cabaret at PIFA), and Executive Director Shana Kennedy put her in touch with the festival, and the collaboration began.

“I went in there and I saw the space, and thought: this is perfect as far as aerial land. It’s tall, with points everywhere,” Furhman said. The festival’s theme: artistic experimentation and uninhibited creativity that Paris 1910 – 1920 gave Fuhrman some ideas to start playing around with. 

One of the things that Furhman kept coming back to was the idea that the period was a time when people and things sped up: they left where they were from and traveled by train, and moved from one place to the other, for reasons ranging from and including love and war. The idea of people passing, meeting, deciding to engage, or not, gave rise to the name and theme Grounded Aerial chose for the piece “Chance Encounters.”

“Chance encounters are timeless in the sense of then happening all the time; they are a human trait,” said Fuhrman. “But I’m putting it in this time and place: the French, early 20th century, time period. And still, there’s a timelessness, to it, whether you’re walking through the airport or the subway, wherever you happen to be. Catch the eye of a stranger…that’s what I’m exploring.”

Grounded Aerial works out of a studio in Williamsburg, where the wall is 16 feet high; available 90-foot walls are pretty hard to come by in Brooklyn or Philadelphia, so Fuhrman and her company are working the piece out in sections.

“With my studio, our wall is a whopping 16 feet high, which is nice to get down the gist and the very general blocking,” she said. Fuhrman is creating the piece for six professional dancer/aerialists, and six dancers from the Philadelphia University of the Arts, giving the student artists an experience working with a professional company.

“My dancer/aerialists are veterans,” Furhman explained. “We’ve all been in different aerial shows:  De La Guarda,  Fuerza Bruta.” Their combined many years of experience is what they’re using to estimate what the finished piece will look like, and how to get used to the space once they get on (or up on) it.

And, as the gala approaches, the company will essentially give everyone who’s passing by a good look at an open rehearsal. They’ll be up on the wall at Verizon Hall from April 4-6 for several hours a day, finishing their blocking and rehearsing and teching the piece.

Aaron Verdery is the technical director of Grounded Aerial, and the man who makes the dancers fly. Verdery was in on the project from its inception, and he’s met with the technical staff of the Kimmel Center to work out every detail of a system that will keep the aerialists safe and able to do their work.

Furhman is proud of her company’s record.

“Our history involves extensive safety training and aerial background that has been instilled in us for years. We’re trained aerialists as well as dancers: we’re not only dancers that happen to be in the air.”

The piece is choreographed and teched down to the second, Furhman explained, from the ground up. The six aerialists become 3 couples, with ensemble choreography, and a duet for one couple in the middle of the piece.

“We show how they’re meeting, and their nuances and it’s like a commentary on couples, fear involved, apprehension of developing their romance, and like a quick, then the 2 other couples on either side come back down, continue and with the remaining of the piece,” Furhman said. “It starts with a really grand ‘Moulin Rougey’ kind of waltz, then an adagio, guitar section, then after that the duet, then back to the waltz, and then the piece ends.”  The company has been working on the piece, which should check in at about 12 minutes, in 3-times-a-week rehearsals for the last three months.

In addition, Grounded Aerial is doing a show closer to their home ground (or wall) at the Brooklyn Lyceum. It’s is called Insectinside, and it’s a dance/theater piece in which the 14 performers play insects. Furhman plays a Luna Moth. She’s been developing the piece for the last six years, and it just so happens that her leading man is a Spider.

(Insert “Turn Off the Dark” joke here). Or, for $15, you can buy a ticket to a show where nobody gets hurt.
This interview is brought to you with the support of PIFA (Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts).  If you liked the interview above and want to help ensure that PIFA becomes an annual event please Like their Facebook Page and Follow them on Twitter !

I’m very excited that the city of my birth, that is, the City of Brotherly Love, that is, where the Phillies play, is having an excellent international arts festival, and I’ve been invited to write about it. I’m certainly planning on grabbing one o’those cheap buses with the free Wi-Fi and making my way 99 miles south for some of the events. I had a chance to see a sneak preview here in NYC a few weeks ago, and have been going over the festival brochure and marking it up with “got to see” and “this looks good!”

One of the highlights of the NYC preview was a monologue from Seth Rozin’s chamber musical “A Passing Wind.” Seth Rozin is also Artistic Director of InterAct Theater, one of the many vibrant indie theater companies in Philly, and one that is close to my heart because they have paid me for my work not once, but twice! (Stories I wrote were featured in their late, lamented series, “Writers Aloud.”) If you’re an American playwright, you know (or should know) that since 1988, InterAct’s mission has been to support the creation of new plays, and one which uses “theatre as a tool to foster positive social change in the school, the workplace and the community.”

InterAct is currently in the midst of a 20-year (!) program, begun in 2007 that offers development awards and commissions for new plays each year. The playwrights who have received these awards/commissions thus far are some veteran folk (Lee Blessing) and outstanding new voices (Kara Lee Corthron) who now have a chance to create new plays with the support of a working theater. In Philadelphia.

The monologue I saw from “A Passing Wind” featured actor Tim Moyer as Sigmund Freud; Freud narrates the play, but he’s not the character the title refers to, rather, that character is a man whose talents were a bit lower down.

Once, Paris stood enthralled before (or behind) the man they called “Le Petomane” or “The Fartiste.” Joseph Pujol (1857-1945) was a man with a peculiar talent: he could suck water or air into his butt, and release it with precision control. As a performer, he usually did this with air, as I’m sure the water would have been quite messy. Pujol left his trade as a baker in Marseilles to take to the stage in 1887. With an air of confidence, he moved on to the big city (Paris), where he made it to the Show: The Moulin Rouge.

Wikipedia notes that: “Some of the highlights of his stage act involved sound effects of cannon fire and thunderstorms, as well as playing "'O Sole Mio" and "La Marseillaise" on an ocarina through a rubber tube in his anus.  He could also blow out a candle from several yards away. His audience included Edward, Prince of Wales, King Leopold II of the Belgians and Sigmund Freud.” (And from such entries as this are ideas for plays born…in fact, my friend & fellow playwright Charlie Schulman is working on an off-Broadway musical, a hit at NY Fringe a couple years back, called “The Fartiste” also about Pujol. But surely there is room in the American theatre for two plays about a man who took the advice “blow it out your ass” literally).

There’s a YouTube video of Le Petomaine (which I've linked below) from a film made in the 1880s (which of course, sadly, doesn’t have a soundtrack).

Along with the grossly wonderful premise of a man who made his living by farting, is the reality that The War to End All Wars (WW I, not the sequel), drove Pujol from the stage. He found that the horror of war “left unprecedented physical and psychological devastation in its wake,” according to the description of the play. And THAT’s where plays are born.

Written and directed by Rozin, the production will feature Damon Kirsche, Ian Bedford, Maureen Torsney-Weir, Jered McLenigan, Peter Schmitz, Tim Moyer, Leah Walton and Laura Catlaw. Music direction and sound design by Daniel Perelstein; set and lighting design by Peter Whinnery; costume design by Anna Frangiosa; choreography by Karen Getz.

It premieres April 7, running through April 16, at the Innovation Studio of the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, 300 S. Broad Street. Tickets are $15-$29, and available here.

This interview is brought to you with the support of PIFA (Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts).  If you liked the interview above and want to help ensure that PIFA becomes an annual event please Like their Facebook Page and Follow them on Twitter !