The Abode of Snow

Jubilat interview about Odyssey Works’ 2009 piece, “The Necessary Angel”

Abraham Burickson — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 04:37:45 +0000

The latest issue of Jubilat is out in stores now, and contains a long interview with me about Odyssey Works’ 2009 performance, “the Necessary Angel.” Unfortunately, you can’t find it online, but there is a bit of an introduction to it here: http://www.jubilat.org/jubilat/archive/20/jubilat_interview/

Odyssey Works 2012 IndieGoGo Campaign is Now Live!

Abraham Burickson — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 02:46:23 +0000

Please support our IndieGoGo campaign at http://www.indiegogo.com/OdysseyWorks. We’re trying to fund our 2012 season – the most ambitious ever! We’ll be doing performances in New York, San Francisco, and Austin, TX.

Untitled from abraham burickson on Vimeo.

New Publications

Abraham Burickson — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 18:50:09 +0000

Hey folks, check out a couple of new publications of mine – at Blackbird (the online journal of VCU)
but for us they… and if an inner landscape

Odyssey Works 2012

Abraham Burickson — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 18:33:04 +0000

Just a bit of an update here. I have been working with folks in New York, Austin, and San Francisco to prepare an Odyssey Works 2012 season. There will likely be a kickstarter to supplement grants and other funds for this year. We plan to do three performances – one in each of the aforementioned cities – all in 2012. It should be an intense year! More information, as well as how to apply to have a piece made for you, will be available in the next few months.

Complicity!

Abraham Burickson — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 15:47:41 +0000

This weekend was the premiere of Complicity, a play I wrote a few years back. The play was considered unproducable by the SF theater company who had intended to put it on. Cornell’s Risley Theater, however, thought they could handle it. This is what the Ithaca Post had to say in its preview:
ITHACA THEATERGOERS WILL have the chance to take in a performance that pushes theater to its limits and beyond this weekend at Risley Hall. “Complicity,” written by Abraham Burickson directed by Carolina Osorio Gil and Sarah Myers, is the story of a couple in love and the obsessions that drive them apart. It is also an updated Orpheus myth that takes its audience with it on a journey to the underworld.

“The play is fundamentally participatory; actors break the forth wall and engage the audience, then they break the fifth wall and make the audience part of their reality. Everybody who comes to the show walks out having been through what the characters have been through,” wrote Burickson.

The performance starts in Risley Theater, but the audience soon finds itself out of its seats and lead on a journey out of the building and deep into the heart of the story as they uncover what has happened to the lovers. Some scenes revolve around improvised conversations with the actors, others draw the audience into a surreal world where they are suddenly and irrevocably involved in the fate of the characters. “I’d never seen a script like this before,” said Osorio Gil, “nearly half of it was structured improvisation. A huge demand is placed on the actors to make their performances real and believable, not just to the audience but to them, too.”

Staging was incredibly challenging as well. “That’s why we have two directors, one to focus on the acting, one on the staging. The play was commissioned for a theater company in San Francisco, but they didn’t have the facilities to put it on. We’re lucky at Risley that we can do it.”

Director Osorio Gil and Writer Burickson are both Artists-in-Residence at Cornell. Burickson is the director of the San Francisco-based performance group Odyssey Works and Osorio Gil is an Ithaca-base actor and director who has worked extensively with Actor’s Workshop of Ithaca and Teatro Taller.

Complicity will happen three times only, Friday and Saturday, March 4 and 5 at 8:00 p.m., with a Saturday matinee at 2:00 p.m. Risley Theater is located at the south end of Risley Hall, on Thurston Avenue, on Cornell’s North Campus. Tickets are $8. Because of the interactive nature of this performance, seating is limited to 30 attendees per performance.

Odyssey Works Wants to Make a Performance for You!

Abraham Burickson — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 16:28:54 +0000

Odyssey Works

Call for Participants!

For Odyssey Works: New York, a day-long, interdisciplinary performance.

The Event:

A day-long performance created for a single participant, based on the way that participant sees the world. If your application is chosen, we will create this for you alone, free of charge.

Part experimental theater, part artistic procession, and part psychological journey, Odyssey Works: New York will happen only once and will have as its protagonist a single participant for whom the artists and actors are supporting characters in a fully immersive performance.

In previous journeys, participants have found themselves in rowboats crossing the river Styx to the underworld, happened upon a tunnel echoing with recordings of their own thoughts, or been asked to conduct an orchestra of screams, laughs and tears. What will happen this time is a closely guarded secret.

Who You Are:

Participants must be over 18 and available to participate in a daylong performance starting in New York City on April 16-17, 2011. Participants must also be willing to open their lives to us in preparation through a series of questionnaires, conversations, and interviews.

Who We Are:

Odyssey Works is an interdisciplinary collaborative arts and performance group that explores the boundary between artist and audience. Directed by Abraham Burickson, Odyssey Works has been producing large-scale productions for small audiences since 2001. This is the group’s first East Coast production. Odyssey Works: New York is sponsored by grants from the Cornell Council on the Arts and the Risley College for the Creative and Performing Arts. For more information, and to see video of past participants, point your web browser to www.odysseyworks.org

The Catch:

There is no catch. Participation is completely free. If you are interested in having a performance created for you, please email applications@odysseyworks.org for an application. You may also simply download one from the www.odysseyworks.org by clicking on “APPLY”. Inquiries can also be sent to this address. Be sure to include your contact information.

Odyssey Works NY Call for Participants

Odyssey Works Website Now Up!

Abraham Burickson — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 21:45:25 +0000

It’s at www.odysseyworks.org. Full functionality is not yet there, but it is a lot of fun to tool around already.

oh, and the Movable Feast video is here

and the Henry Video is here!

The videos for the Odyssey Works 2009 projects are coming soon!

Charlie, the Chapbook, Available on Codhill Press

Abraham Burickson — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 16:35:16 +0000

My new chapbook is out on Codhill Press. The cover was designed by Lauren Kohne, a synaesthetic artist who sees letters as colors. She can read the cover as a poem. Can you? There’s only one way to find out. Get a copy at Amazon or (better, faster) Codhill Press.

Charlie, A Chapbook

Jake Silverstein’s Nothing Happened and Then it Did

Abraham Burickson — Tue, 18 May 2010 16:34:24 +0000

Hey, this book is classified as fiction and non-fiction – what a thrill to be able to put it on two shelves, no? It is worth reading for that genre-bending feat as well. Of course, the shtick is just a shtick, as all fiction is filled with non- and all non- is filled with fiction.

Genre distractions aside, the book is a page-turner, even though it turned out that I had read two of the chapters before (one in the New Yorker, and one in Harpers). I was glad to get a chance to buzz through it all again, to ride a wave of connected narrative arcs, following a bumbling Jake Silverstein as he fails to make it as a magazine writer. Though he is nothing like Etgar Keret, I love this book for many of the same reasons I love a Keret book; it is light and has a loose tendency to touch on meaning, and just when you expect the plot to go somewhere, the protagonist gets in his car and admits failure, and just when you expect the plot to go nowhere, the protagonist happens upon a device that pushes it forward in unexpected ways.

The fiction here is almost indistinguishable from the non-fiction, and, while this is a testament to Silverstein’s agility with his imagination, it is also a testament to his willingness to see the facts of his life for their more unblemished narrative potential. I’m not saying it’s disingenuous, but one might read the book and think of the author as a failed magazine writer (a tough call for a former Harper’s editor and the current chief of Texas Monthly), and would think of Marfa Texas as a random small town in west Texas, populated by cowboys rather than the incredibly weird mix of high-art emigres and art-foundation workers that make the city survive. His painting of these things is rather fictive, but I don’t mind, as he seems to be calling himself out on this front anyway. On the whole, the reading is nothing if not fun. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

On Having Gone Back to Read Tom Robbins Again

Abraham Burickson — Thu, 13 May 2010 06:13:02 +0000

There are risky moments in the long life of a book lover, moments when, in a fit of nostalgia, he returns to some old favorite hoping to reencounter that early sense of discovery and awe, that un-jaded, youthful moment when a book was not just a gateway to a new set of ideas, but a model of what creativity was capable of, of the brilliant potential of the human mind when it toils long and hard and far past the thought patterns of everyday thought. Certain early books are safe to come back to – Siddhartha, Wallace Stevens’ Collected Works, Moby Dick. Others, one must be more cautious about; is it wise to reread Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude? Probably. What about Sartre, Camus? Tread carefully. Kerouak? Best stay away, leave that copy of On the Road next to The Outsiders and move on. Sometimes, in the course of such a sentimental search, one is tempted to read a previously unread book by a once-loved author like Kurt Vonnegut or Steven King. This is frequently a terrible idea. So it was with me as I read Tom Robbins’ Half Asleep in Frog’s Pajamas. The book managed to not only bore and irritate me with its endless cleverness and disregard for plot, but to cast violently into doubt my memory of loving his other books.
Clearly, Robbins is a writer unlike any other. His renown, built on such books as Skinny Legs and All and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, is well-deserved. It is hard to think of another writer who deals with the subjects he does, and one who does it so damn cleverly. The books are, in fact, an all-expenses paid cruise in the Persian Gulf of cleverness, and if you are really on board for that kind of trip it is a wonderful one. Nary a paragraph goes by without a quirky metaphor and a brain-twisting allusion. “The receptionist,” starts one of Robbins’ countless descriptions, “- she probably has a different title – is a fortyish matron who looks as if she might have spent a lot of time in a freezer locker. Her face is ashen , flat, and lopsided, like a stone-axed cut of caveman meat, a reptile steak for a prehistoric barbecue.” This character is completely inconsequential, but the inconsequential is the point of Robbins’ prose, and he continues: “Her eyes are spots of gristle, and her thin mouth is an ax wound in the fillet.” The character hardly exists for another paragraph and one is left wondering why so much time was wasted describing the woman. But this is clearly the recipe Robbins is using – toss together a mind blowing assemblage of odd and over-described personages and scenes, sprinkle a minimum of plot and a maximum of weird and quirky factoids and shake well, then see what comes out. The result is a compellingly unusual blurb. This is the story, written in the second-person, of a money-obsessed Phillipina on the eve of her financial ruin who finds herself faced with a litany of mind-altering events. Ostensibly hunting for her boyfriend’s runaway kleptomaniac monkey, our protagonist becomes entangled and slowly falls in love with a former investment banker named Larry Diamond, whose seduction of the protagonist threatens to unleash not only her libido but her atavistic memories of aliens and magical reptilian creatures. Along the way she encounters a wild cast of characters, from her psychic, overweight best friend Q-Jo, who also goes missing, to a Native American obsessed with a Van Gogh drawing he keeps beneath a bowling alley, to a mysterious Japanese doctor who coyly touts his cure for cancer on TV.
The cliché in theater is that if there is a gun on the table in the first act it must go off by the third. In this book the gun is the Japanese doctor’s cancer cure, and all 385 pages, the reader waits for it to go off. At the end it does go off, but we find that it is shooting blanks. There is nothing interesting about the resolution of this information, as there is little interesting or surprising about Q-Jo’s mysterious disappearance. For that matter, the monkey’s mysterious disappearance turns out to have little meaning as well. The only interesting show in the book is the protagonist’s slow character transformation and awakening. From the beginning we know that this will be the point, as her description is a caricature of a money-obsessed businessman (don’t be distracted by the fact that she’s a woman or a minority in this). The transformation, however, is patiently executed, and is the one shining light in the plot. Otherwise, the major part of our reading time is allotted to a tiresome and endless stoner lecture by Larry Diamond on the human race, amphibians from outer space, African tribesmen with a connection to the stars, and a general end-of-the-world hysteria. The lecture, in the same voice as the narration and thereby of Robbins, himself, we can assume, amounts to nothing. Like the supporting character in Ayn Rand’s awful opus, The Fountainhead, Larry Diamond turns out to be a mouthpiece for the author himself. But unlike the Fountainhead, Half-Asleep in Frog’s Pajamas, other than a general tweaker’s anti-establishment ranting, has nothing real to say.