Cupola Bobber

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The Field, The Mantel (performance, 2011)

"These are the founding fathers. That's me there, on the right." -Cupola Bobber

Starring Buffalo Bill, Groucho Marx, Malcolm X, Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King and Lyndon B. Johnson, the performance explores how a nation’s history gets told and why.

Four Stars from Time Out Chicago: "This is an uncanny performance, and one Chicago should embrace..."

"What makes their work so compelling are the additional elements of Cupola Bobber's homemade, minimal visual aesthetic and their charmingly inelegant, often hamhanded choreographed movements. This combination of the physically gawky and the elegance of their theoretical and philosophical explorations results in an absurdity that's both very funny and profoundly humane." - Monica Westin, New City Chicago

Two performers in knee-length nightshirts stumble blindly through a set of 65 cardboard boxes, unpacking their large archive by dreaming, and filling in the void that is the narrative history(s) it suggests. They are both Buffalo Bill Cody standing on the moon, before anybody else. They discover the race races that were in the Wild West Show - Cody’s show that defined the still-young America for much of the world - and the race war at the core of that show’s drama. They discover that all of it is their national history, and they want to imagine a new better future.

At the center of the piece is a movement sequence accompanied by four American speeches from 1964 played on tape cassette players. Driven by a constant tempo, the two performers race in a tight circle, careen off each other, drag each other, carry each other, support each other, and collide to King’s Dream, Malcolm X’s Bullet or the Ballot, Johnson proposing a Great Society, and Reagan attacking Johnson et al. Most of all, they keep going, they keep getting up. Part dance, part sound installation, the section embodies the ideological struggle of a nation colliding with itself and encouraging itself, as it tries to become something better than what it is.

To hear Ronald Reagan, Lyndon Johnson, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King each use our Founding Fathers and the progress of our nation as a rhetorical hinge in their radically different imaginings of a better country (a better world), is to feel the beautiful messiness of a modern democracy struggling with itself and its history. Each of us are impostures of one kind or another, trying on ways to feel better, or ways to become better people. The question is, are our fabrications salve for a cynical exceptionalism, or radical attempts to shape the future?

“The archive is a repository of dream material.The work of history is not memory work but dream work.”
-Steve Reinke

“The organism is fixed on top of a temporal converter – no, it is a converter of time.” - Michel Serres

The Field, The Mantle – Eine Auftragsproduktion der 16. Internationalen Schillertage in Kooperation zwischen dem Nationaltheater Mannheim und Cupola Bobber