A.W.O.L. or THE WAR OF BOUFFON

2009 - Eleffant Foot Theater Company presented A.W.O.L - a highly charged physical performance with  haunting sounds of live Middle Eastern drumming and ecstatic poetry.

Where:  Peter Jones Gallery Theater, 1806 W. Cuyler, Chicago, IL

When:  June 5th through June 28th,
             Fridays & Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 4pm,
             special free show Saturday June 6th at 4:30pm

Directed by: Masha Kore Neva

Designed by: Masha Kore Neva and Michael Day

Live Music by: Dana Dardai and Jake Vaness

Shadow puppets by: Barbara Swem

Created and Performed by: Jesica Farmer, Jeff Trainor, Sandro Garibashvili, Alexander Knapp, Eva Sirp, Eliza Burmester and Matt Paterson.

AWOL comes from a place of anger and bitterness of watching the Middle East - US conflict evolve and escalate into the Tragedy of the Iraq War. The action takes place in Babylon, the ancient kingdom of Ur, the mysteries of ancient times and contemporary zeal of destruction are explored through the poetry of Biblical Apocalypses and contemporary imagery. The story, devised by the actors, based on the research of documentary materials from the War, is centered around two US Army officers that go AWOL during one of the military operations and find themselves lost in the desert wilderness with Baghdad far behind. We use the bouffons as a supporting chorus to demonstrate the pure Idiocy of War and our own misconceptions of it.

                              

"Earnest, willing and perpetually child-like, Eleffant foot's  chorus of undifferentiated bouffons are like a group of renegade teletubbies: they gurgle, coo and clown their way through the various scenarios, alternating roles of aggressor and victim with mercurial facility.  As such, they require a suspension of disbelief as well as of narrative sense making: they are not telling a story so much as embodying human absurdity.  Their world might not make sense in a linear fashion, yet the relationships and activities they unmask feel perfectly believable and paradoxical: thus war itself is exposed as sanctioned insanity...."

Keralee Frobell