“99 Goldfish Space Ballet ” – 2014, 2015

https://vimeo.com/122145250 (1 min 32 sec sample)

The performer (me) in gold sequins and goggles explores inhalation and exhalation and bursting and bursting and floating away. The wind changes everything, always.

A complete overlap between puppetry and performance art, this was first produced in 2014 as a two day installation for a street festival in Chicago, commissioned by Joseph Ravens and the dfb gallery. This was the work as “performance art”, and I performed in the streets in the context of a street festival for two days during the daytime for eight hours, with breaks.

In the space ballet, people are encouraged to jump in: no one is in charge here – only the longing to release deeper dreams – OUR imaginations transform ordinary objects and escape OUR confines:

Goldfish escape from ordinary plastic bags, with all their oily landfilling associations, a soundtrack of the solar system’s radio noise. Water-balloons become radio-like transmitters to tell us what the invisible free fish captured by the bags-form have to say. the performer has a goldfish head.

This was re-appropriated in 2015 as “guerilla” theatre for Magnetic North Theatre festival in Ottawa. Above people listen to water-balloons with colourful cup-amplifiers to “make contact with their fish”.