Dance & Performance Art
Untitled, for the Salon at Studio Gracia, San Francisco
An example of new performance art in development.
Dance & Performance Art
Untitled, for the Salon at Studio Gracia, San Francisco
An example of new performance art in development.
Behind the Wallpaper
Behind the Wallpaper is a stand alone piece collaboratively created by Andrea, Stephanie and Stevie from Corpus Callosum. This piece debuted at Anno Domini Gallery in San Jose as a collaboration of performance and music for furniture. The songs were written by Andrea, Stephanie and Schubert, and as accompanied by Stevie, they together build a home.
Parades, Stilts & Masks
Corpus Callosum’s performance skillset includes stilts, mask and musical parades. Our aim with our improvisational performances is not only to embellish our surroundings with a more odd and magical atmosphere, but to emphasize the oddity of performance by carefully walking the line between our proposed characters and our mundane reality. It is our hope that, by exposing our apparatuses (especially our faces, beneath the masks) that we will be able to affect our audiences less as “suspension of disbelief” than as an experience of the uncanny.
(photo: Fenchurch)
(photo: Left Coast Live)
(photo: Rubin Abdi)
(photo: Left Coast Live)
(photo: Brian Eder)
(photo: Fenchurch)
(photo: Anna Larina)
(photo: Left Coast Live)
(photo: Left Coast Live)
The Moth & the Moon
The Moth & the Moon is a short atmospheric piece with which we open some musical sets: A masked Lamplighter sifts through the crowd carrying a lantern on a 12” pole, pursued by a giant atlas moth (puppeteered by a stilter); when the Lamplighter reaches the stage he uses his lantern to light the moon, onto which the moth lands - and so the music begins.
(above photo: Rubin Abdi; photos below by Corpus Callosum)
The Museum Proper
The Museum Proper is a festival-scale puppet show directed & built by Dax Tran-Caffee, with an original score written and performed live by Corpus Callosum & Deathat. The Museum Proper was displayed at the SF Maker Faire and debuted at the 3rd annual SubZERO Festival in San Jose, 2010.
In this show, a Collector (puppeteered by Susie Danzig) hunts down a variety of creatures (puppeteered by members of Corpus Callosum) until coming across a monster that is too large for his net. Eventually victorious, the Collector must then drag the enormous monster home, by himself.
Watch the video documentation, or visit the Museum Proper website for more information on the puppet show. More photos of this event have been posted to the Museum Proper flickr group.
(photo: Danielle Peña)
(photo: Brian Eder)
(photo: Huynh Yen Tran)
(photo: Danielle Peña)
(photo: Danielle Peña)
(photo: Danielle Peña)
(photo: Brian Eder)
(photo: Rubin Abdi)
(photo: Karl Dotter)
(photo: Danielle Peña)
Bike Trailer Flotilla
On March 27th, 2010, Corpus Callosum built and boarded three bike trailers, a tandem bicycle and a little red wagon and rode along with the SF Tweed Ride to the Berkeley Marina. We traveled separately along the route, then converged at the shore to perform a little set of music.
There is also a rather sophisticated video of an earlier performance with the SF Tweed Ride - April 2009 - though it did not, unfortunately, involve bike trailers.
The Royal Cartographer
“The Royal Cartographer” or “The Portable Picturebox” is one of the oldest Corpus Callosum performances, originally built in 2004 - though the performance did not truly come together until 2008. It consists of a 10ft scrolling painting, accompanied by a narration, which tells the story of a king who covers the world in paper (inspired by the Jorge Luis Borges short story, “On Exactitude in Science”). We perform this piece regularly as part of our musical set.
(the video above is taken from a solo performance by Dax in Chicago, 2007 - pending a more recent video with the whole band, which includes a music box programmed with the melody of “Insecteopus Rex”)
This Innevitable Accumulation
“This Innevitable Accumulation OR The Stars” is a 10-minute stand-alone puppet show which debuted in Fall 2009, and has since been performed as an opening sequence for many Corpus Callosum performances. The show is performed by Qarly Canant (puppet) and Dax Tran-Caffee (scenes), and is generally presented in conjunction with the Hanging of the Stars.
(photo: Huynh Yen Tran)
(photo: Audrey Penven)
(photo: Audrey Penven)
(photo: Audrey Penven)
(photo: Audrey Penven)
Hanging of the Stars
As a collaborative group we use different performative elements to set an unexpected atmosphere that one might not normally find in a typical music set at your local pub. The Hanging of the Stars developed as one of the first performance pieces that we made together as a 7 piece ensemble. A stilt walker will unexpectedly enter the scene and walk around the room in its entirety hanging illuminated stars about the heads of the audience. This performance sometimes occurs as a closing thought to This Inevitable Accumulation, and usually opens and closes a musical set.
photos by Brian Eder of Anno Domini
