Response from Michelle Peñaloza, OtB Writers Corps Ambassador

Place your feet upon my chest                       leap forward blind

Stop stop stop              get it right, her therapist’s here

let’s begin again

            the fourth border: a cylinder refracted in fringe

response by NKO Rey, OtB Writers Corps Ambassador

poem by Daemond Arrindell, OtB Writers Corps Ambassador

harold has grown up. He calls himself alan now, 

and traded in his purple crayon for little brown mushrooms.

his imagination is still as wild as the blank wall let him be

harold doesn’t draw on the walls anymore, he’s too busy tripping on mushrooms

outside, with his friends - the spirits, and the chicken that lays the [golden] eggs,

Review by Michelle Peñaloza, OtB Writers Corps Ambassador

Alan Sutherland’s Little Brown Mushrooms is part inside joke, part memoir-dreamscape, part praise poem, part science lesson, part how-to, naturalist lecture, part self-help lesson, part life affirmation, and part Public Service Announcement on the merits of psychedelics, experimentation, and the outdoors.

This season, an Ambassador Writers Corps* Member will write a profile on each of the nine local artists in 16/17. These in-depth conversations between local artists and local writers will take the place of curatorial notes in the performance programs. 

Verdensteatret Bridge over Mud is a perfect theater, the one that reminds of theater Edward Gordon Craig’s evokes in his essay “The Actor and the Ubermarionette.” “If you can find in nature a new material, one which has never been used by man to give form to his thoughts,” writes Craig, “then you can say that you are on the high road towards creating a new art. For you have found that by which you can create it.” (EGC, “The Actor and the Ubermarionette”, The Mask, Vol. 1. p.

There’s a 1929 painting by the American artist Arthur Dove that I’ve loved for a long time, though I’ve only ever seen it in reproduction. It’s called Fog Horns, and though you can read in it landscape and layers of atmosphere and distance, it is as much about sound as it is space, as Dove’s title signals. Concentric ovals suggest the way sound travels, starting loud and concentrated at a center and then softening as it moves out from its source, waves of sound over and overlapping waves of water. 

Verdensteatret’s Bridge Over Mud begins with the same intention as the Annunciation but is different from the Latin version of Gabriel’s announcement to Virgin Mary. It begins, however, with the announcement of the arrival of glorious life.