Spoken Word & Performance
All the rush of a subway car on the loose, all the music of a brain scan on acid, all the power of a dive into Niagara.
— Bob Holman
Sample looks — A Cd & A Performance
when bill danced the war
Chickened Fingers, A DIY Performance
Chickened Fingers, A DIY Performance
This illustration from the booklet which accompanied the CD of this monologue performed with Keith Jafrate and Shaun Blezard of Orfeo 5, shows my dad, Bill Sherar (back row extreme right), one of the first Pathfinders onto Saipan in WWII, with his Japanese family in Nagasaki circa 1950. The post marks ground zero for the explosion of the atom bomb.
Chickened Fingers, A DIY Performance
Chickened Fingers, A DIY Performance
Chickened Fingers, A DIY Performance
Dedicated to all those who have ever worked the line piecing poultry at a rate of up to 45 chickens per minute, this easy to duplicate performance can be integrated into an event or done as an installation or performance.
All you need is catering cards and some chicken wings. Plus, if you serve them, someting to splint your hands in solidarity.
Two Monologues...
Of subways & rifles wrapped in brown paper....
This one is for my brother Tim Murphy because it tells the story of the rifle I hauled through the NYC subway to my home in Brooklyn after painting it for a design class at Parson's school of design with Marvin Israel. The third in a series that started with using words with objects to become putting words on an object and then just words to make an object in the mind, with this the chosen object concrete as hell held between my legs facing backwards in the old F train car heading for Cobble Hill and nodding off from lack of sleep after being up all night getting it ready, Its sight sticking through the brown paper wrapping when three kids surround me to ask me about it. Not that I told them much about what I went through to get it from my brother, recently drafted and down in Fort Gordon Georgia that winter of '67 for basic training, nor will I tell you either but pretty soon I should have a recording and you can hear it all then.
Oklahoma UhOh
This monologue, performed in various venues throughout Canada, was performed as Xochicalco 2006 on February 15th, 2011 in the Banff Center's Jeanne & Peter Lougheed building during the Revolution 2012 Aboriginal Arts Residency facilitated by Adrian Stimson.
A video was made of the live performance with a steady camera aimed upward to celebrate the spiral placing of the stones in Xochicalco's observatory chimney which focuses and refracts the light that enters the cave below only between the sun's two zeniths over the ancient city, thus taking in too, the summer solstice where the author was present in 2006.
The video was later shown on a large screen in a darkened theatre. Recorded in HD and Dolby 5.1, the papers Xerar Murphy dropped as she came down the stairs seemed to whistle eerily behind viewers as Murphy's voice echoed on the staircase.
This video was subsequently shown in Maine and New Brunswick together with The Weavers, a literary installation celebrating Maya weaving and commemorating the Guatemalan genocide of the 80's. Information is available about The Weavers in the art and installation section.
Alex Ashcroft sound
Paul Carter & Phil Hession video
& with a special thanks to Adrian Stimson and all the participants in the Revolution 2012 residency.
Click on the image to watch the video or read the transcript.
