Quantcast

The DNAinfo archives brought to you by WNYC.
Read the press release here.

Exquisite Corpse Festival Brings Old Parlor Game to the Stage

By Mary Johnson | October 3, 2011 8:16am
The Exquisite Corpse is an old game in which three different people draw one piece of a body without knowing what the other participants are thinking or drawing until the end.
The Exquisite Corpse is an old game in which three different people draw one piece of a body without knowing what the other participants are thinking or drawing until the end.
View Full Caption
David D'Ostilio, Jason Bell and Robert Bell

KIPS BAY — A new festival is looking to bring an old surrealist parlor game to a Kips Bay stage.

The inaugural, 10-day Exquisite Corpse Festival will involve roughly 100 artists who have come together to fill the Richmond Shepard Theatre on East 26th Street and Second Avenue with short plays and dance, taxidermy and tattoos.

The game and the festival it has inspired share the same name: the Exquisite Corpse. In game form, it began in the early 1900s as a pastime for surrealists, members of an intellectual and political movement who valued spontaneous expression and unbridled creativity, said festival organizer Jason Tyne-Zimmerman.

The game was originally played with words, à la Mad Libs, Tyne-Zimmerman said. Players selected individual parts of a sentence independently from one another and then put those words together to form what often added up to nonsensical sentences.

Its macabre-sounding name came from one of those early word jumbles, which read: “The exquisite corpse drinks the young wine.”

Eventually, the game evolved beyond words and into drawing, Tyne-Zimmerman said.

Players would fold a sheet of paper in three so that only one section of the paper was visible at one time. The task was to draw a body. One person would draw the head. One would draw the torso, and another would draw the legs.

No one playing the game would be able to see what the others were drawing until the end, when everyone completed their section and the paper was unfolded to reveal the combination of individual creations.  

“It was a great way for them to be able to work together but not suppress their self-conscious,” said Tyne-Zimmerman, 34, an operations assistant at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center.

The game has been replicated in sculpture and painting, Tyne-Zimmerman said. But Exquisite Corpse theater is rare because it’s a much more cooperative medium.

Still, Tyne-Zimmerman wanted to try.

Over the course of the past year or so, he assembled a cast of about 100 artists to create the roughly two-hour show that will consist of plays, dancing, improv, taxidermy and tattoos.

“It sounds like a big hot mess, but then you get there, and amazing things start to happen,” Tyne-Zimmerman said.

Every performance has been divided into three parts and produced independently.

For example, three different choreographers contributed to the dance number, which will be performed by three different sets of dancers. Their individually produced sections will not come together until the tech rehearsal, which will be the first time the show will be performed in its entirety.

“I’m curious to see how it goes,” said Jessica Parks, 29, one of the choreographers working on the project.

“Dance-wise, it’s bizarre because we have three separate dance companies, three separate choreographers who have never met or interacted,” said Parks, who lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn. “It’s all in the spirit of a game, and there’s a lot of mystery.”

In addition to the more traditional theatrical mediums like stage-plays and dancing, Tyne-Zimmerman is also adding a few odd touches.

The emcee will wear a dress designed by three different people.

Tyne-Zimmerman also found three taxidermists who agreed to work on a sculptural piece combining the body parts of a rabbit, a crow and a duck, he said.

“They put it together, and it’s this amazing piece,” he added. “It’s not really that creepy because it’s so interesting to look at.”

The resulting animal will be on display throughout the show’s 10-day run. No animals were killed to produce the parts, Tyne-Zimmerman, a vegetarian, insisted. The creatures used in the piece were already dead when they were found.

As a special treat in the bizarre experimental show, the show’s opening night performance will include a live tattooing that also taps into the spirit of the Exquisite Corpse.

Tyne-Zimmerman said he found a person who is willing to donate a chunk of skin on his shoulder to the show. That person will come on opening night, and get tattooed by three artists from Sacred Tattoo in Chinatown.

As each piece of the tattoo is completed, it will be covered with gauze so that the next artist has no idea what has been inked thus far. The person getting the tattoo will have no say in the design.

Surprisingly, Tyne-Zimmerman said it was easy to find someone willing to get a mystery tattoo in front of a live audience. The allure, he added, seemed to be the opportunity to have an entirely original piece of body art.

“New York is really the only place you can do this [type of show],” Tyne-Zimmerman said. “It’s kind of like New York supplies anything you need.”

None of the artists—tattoo or otherwise—are getting paid to participate in the festival, Tyne-Zimmerman said. He raised more than $3,000 through a Kickstarter campaign to pay for renting out the theater space, but otherwise, the show is a labor of love.

“All the artists understand that, but they’re also really excited about doing a new kind of art,” he said. “It’s just a playground for them.”

Tyne-Zimmerman, who produced an Exquisite Corpse art exhibit this past summer, hopes to make the festival an annual event, incorporating different media each time. He would love to do something with mixology or furniture, he said.

“We’re never going to make the great American play because that kind of art and craftsmanship does take agony and labor,” he said. “[But] this is exciting to me. This is what I’ve been looking for.”

The show will run at the Richmond Shepard Theatre from Oct. 13 to 22. Tickets cost $12.