Shared Enchantment

by Sparrow, August 03, 2007

 

Patrick Wadden and Marlena Marallo founded the Arm-of-the-Sea theater company in 1982. The troupe’s first show, “Mr. Avarice and the Great Pumpkin of the World,” was performed at Clearwater’s Pumpkin Festival that same year. Based in Saugerties, the not-for-profit group combines puppetry, masks, paintings, dance, and live music to illuminate the New York City watershed (“City That Drinks the Mountain Sky”), migrant farm labor (“La Cosecha”/“The Harvest”), and to enact colorful folktales. Arm-of-the-Sea appears in community centers, parks, and museums around the country, as well as in Latin America. In honor of its 25th anniversary, the company will perform 25 free shows in venues ranging from Lakeville, Connecticut to Detroit, Michigan.

On August 24 and 25 from 7 to 11pm (raindate August 26), Arm-of-the-Sea will present its seventh annual “Esopus Creek Puppet Suite” at Tina Chorvas Waterfront Park in Saugerties. The six-piece Big Sky Ensemble will accompany Arm-of-the-Sea, performing original music by Dean Jones. This festival will also include the Energy Dance Company, the Percussion Orchestra of Kingston, and puppeteer Grian MacGregor presenting an updated staging of the “The Crone Chronicles.” For more information, call (845) 246-7873 or visit www.armofthesea.org.

—Sparrow

Sparrow: What are you creating at the moment?

Patrick Wadden: The show we’re working on, the “Esopus Creek Puppet Suite,” is inspired by the work of an evolutionary microbiologist named Lynn Margulis. That’s someone we’ve been reading this spring, and we’re exploring how life on Earth got to be this immense, dazzling, astounding complexity. Margulis has been working in the realm of microbes—the so-called “simple” beings who were the primary residents of the Earth for about two billion years! Microbes figured out most of the metabolic pathways, most of the structures, and everything else has been built on that. So instead of Alice Through the Looking Glass, it’s Alice Through the Microscope.

That exploration takes place as a play within a play, or, I should say, a circus within a play. The circus is carried on by these characters called the Bio-Illuminarians. They’re the guides through the doors of perception. And who they’re guiding is Rip Van Twinkle, this scientist and artist.