INSIDE LOOK: "Be The Death of Me" Investigation: Father Sebastiaan, Vampyre

Our Artistic Intern, Leonie Ettinger, recently interviewed Father Sebastiaan, a self-defined Vampyre, Fangsmith, and author of occult literature, on his thoughts about death and dying for our new project.  

Father Sebastiann is one of the co-founders of The Sanguinarium, a social network for the Vampyre subculture and created The Endless Night Festival, one of the largest Vampyre gatherings in the world. To learn more about him, click HERE 

Check out a few excerpts from Leonie's interview below. 

What exactly is a Vampyre?

Vampyres are energy beings. They are not a blood drinking physical entity because blood is useless for Vampyres. Instead, they need to leach life force of other human beings because they don't have a body to generate their own. The Vampyre is not about death - like a zombie or demon or death itself. The Vampyre is about life and a cure to death.

The human body is like an embryo to the Vampyre, a place where he lives within like a human in a spacesuit. Immortality must be earned, practiced and refined through mediation, energy work, validation and interaction with the Ancestors ('undead'). If successful, the Vampyre will survive death as an 'undead'. At this time, the 'undead' do not want to be known to the “mundane world”. They are in between life and death. However, when they reveal themselves to the mundane world they appear as magickal friends, angels, spirits, faeries, and more recently some say even aliens.

The grandson of an orthodontist & nephew of a dentist, he also hand-carves custom fangs. 

What do you think happens when we die?

My belief is that when you die, your energy is released into the universe and recycled. The church tells you that if your physical body dies, you die. That makes sense but what happens if that's not the case? What happens if your body dies and you avatar continues? The internet will eventually become something like the Matrix. Our bodies will be useless and our consciousness will be inside the computer. So does that make us energy? Yes. You become immortal and the technology becomes the God - not God. This is a fear and why Vampyres have been given such a bad rep throughout all the centuries.

Can we really achieve immortality?

The only thing that is going to keep the human race alive and give immortality to everybody is that we get off the planet as soon as possible and in the largest numbers possible. We need to colonize Mars or Venus, and then get out of our solar system, and spread out as far as we can into the universe. I want to collect a bunch of people, use the Vampyre as a metaphor, live an amazing life, and reject death. 

Father Sebastiaan's Fangshop established in 1995 is located in the East Village NY

Thanks Leonie and Sebastiaan for sharing! Check back here every Thursday for a look inside our investigation into death, dying and the afterlife in NY. Stay tuned for details about our upcoming performance on June 28 and 29th!  

INSIDE LOOK: Death Project 2013 Investigation: Talking About Suicide

Our Project Dramaturg, Deepali Gupta, recently interviewed journalist Cara Anna, a former foreign correspondent in China, and a suicide attempt survivor for upcoming project about death, dying and the afterlife in NY.  Cara founded the “Talking About Suicide” blog of interviews with other outspoken suicide attempt survivors and edits the new “What Happens Now?” blog for the American Association of Suicidology for those who've had thoughts or actions of suicide. Check out the "Talking about Suicide" blog  HERE, and the "What Happens Now?" blog HERE.

See below for excerpts from Deepali's interview with Cara, where she reflects on her personal experience with suicide, and what prompted her to connect to other survivors.

Cara at airport before leaving for China

"I sent out a resignation email, I went to my apartment, gave everything to the cleaning lady, packed a backpack, and then just set off. I went to the airport and I just stood there looking at the departure board for like, what seemed like an hour, and I was like, 'I don't want to go anywhere.' I love to travel, and here I am looking at like, connections from Beijing to like, everywhere in the world, and I'm like, 'Uh, I don't want to go anywhere, I'm dead.' So, yeah, I went to the hospital, got myself sleeping pills, got anti-vomiting medication, got wine, and there was an abandoned village outside Beijing that I had hiked through, and it was cold, it was February, there was still snow on the ground, and I'm like, 'I'm gonna go there.' And so I hiked up there and in China, people are everywhere and there were two people hiking, and I'm like, 'What the fuck, can I never get a place to myself?'

I was like, 'Well you have to do it before dark. You'll lose your nerve or something, so you just have to do it, just do it.' So you just sort of lay out 1, 2, 3 at that point. I took the stuff, I drank the whole bottle of wine, apparently, which is a first, um, and lay down, it was like, 'Okay, the cold will take care of the rest.' And then, even before opening my eyes, you know how you can see light through your eyelids, that was the next thing I knew, and even before opening my eyes, I'm like, 'It's dawn. Okay. Now what do I do.'

Cara's photo of a memorial to the dead after 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province at a school that collapsed

So I said, 'Well, I'm a journalist, it seems pretty natural to me to just find other people who have been through it. Is anybody talking about it?' So I started the blog, started interviewing people, found people who were out, and just talked to them—just like, the first conversation was so sweet. It was a woman, and we were so nervous talking to each other, it was like we were breaking some sort of rule. 

Cara with her nephew

It's like, should we be talking about this? Are we gonna get in trouble? And it was just a very huge relief, finding out that, wow, she sounded really human and normal and happened to have a bad, a really bad experience. Um, and I've talked to about 40 people so far, from five different countries, and nobody has been rambling, nobody has burst into tears, nobody has had to even take time to collect themselves—nobody's raving, everybody's just like, 'Yeah, this is me, this is my life, I have dogs, I have cats, I have a grad degree, I'm a psychologist, I work on a crisis line, I'm a lawyer, I'm an artist...Hi!' What is so horribly scary about us that nobody wants to talk about it?"

Thank you Cara and Deepali for sharing. Check back every Thursday for a look inside our investigation into death, dying and the afterlife in NY. 

Sneak-Peek of Occupy #S17

Let Me Ascertain You: Occupy #S17 is right around the corner! We have a really incredible lineup of performers and musicians for you (which you can see HERE). Our street team of interviewers has been hard at work talking to lots of new folks, and we can't wait to share their stories with you on Monday. Click HERE to get your tickets! And here is a sneak-peek of some of the interviews we'll be showcasing:

Brazilian theatre activist:

“On January 17th we started a campaign called Glamarchy. Which is Glamourous Anarchy. We, we love acronyms. And the whole idea was to experiment with, um, glitter bombing oppression… Glitter bombing is the art and science of (laughs) having a bunch of glitter in your hand or in a bag and when you see oppression, personal or impersonal, you just aim it and you glitter bomb.”

British former diplomat:

“When I went down to Zuccotti park I could almost feel the bankers looking down on us, laughing, thinking, you know, these guys are just, just, you know, they’re never going to change the way things are really done. So I always felt that Occupy needed to be about actually, practically, building better systems to replace what are very bad systems.”

Man from Shelter System:

“And I would see like, 5 million dollars in some sort of stock transfer and it just astounded me to think that I’m carrying all this money in my, you know, in this satchel and I was getting paid maybe $8.75 a hour to do it. ‘Why am I carrying this 5 million dollars and I’m, you know starving.’”

We have all our interviews available for you HERE (and we added a few more yesterday) if you want to read more! Plus, we have satellite shows of Occupy interviews happening across the country. Here's our list of incredible participants:

Kitchen Dog Theater in Dallas, TX
THE-TREE Institute in Portland, OR
HartBeat Ensemble in Hartford, CT
Theatre4 in New Haven, CT
Hartford Stage Company in Hartford, CT
Bated Breath Theatre Company in Hartford, CT
ARTFARM in Middletown, CT
Capital Classics Theatre Company in Hartford, CT
Jacques Lamarre in Hartford, CT
University of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, OH
Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY
Emerson College in Boston, MA

Follow #S17Civs for updates and conversation that day!

Lastly, this cabaret is launching what we're calling our Autumn of Revolution, which also includes Paris Commune at ArtsEmerson and BAM. We want to know:

If you could change one thing in our country, what would it be? 

Share your responses in the comments!

Meet the R&D: Mia Rovegno - A Housewarming Gift

Today's post is from Mia Rovegno, one of the playwrights in our R&D Group and the director of our most recent Occupy Wall Street cabaret at Joe's Pub earlier this month. The writers in the R&D Group are contributing posts that will give insight into their processes: what they're thinking about, what material they're working with, how their research is informing their writing. For more info about the R&D Group, Mia, or her project, please click here. And here is Mia's post!

Whether I like it or not, every project I work on is inevitably informed by whatever events happen to be swirling around my life at that moment. So I guess it’s not surprising that in the midst of writing a piece centered on American identity and the ways in which the dislocated and relocated search for a sense of “home”, I find my mind occupied by the insta-community that sprang to life on September 17^th in Manhattan’s Liberty Square: The people of Occupy Wall Street.

For past couple of months at The Civilians, we’ve been conducting and transcribing hours upon hours of interviews from various Occupy events to create what we hope can be a kind of living document of this unique historical moment. I’m all for the pursuit of defining more ways in which art and activism can collide in the American theater without having to pull out the self-congratulatory soapbox or the factoid-y power point presentation. And working with The Civilians is a refreshing reminder that it is indeed possible to pull this off. Artists can be topical AND entertaining! Audiences can feel feelings AND learn something! Not to mention that all of us actually are capable of humbly checking in with our humanity without self-flagellation or hoisting our politics onto some pedestal. Seriously. It’s possible.

Case in point: Last week I had the privilege of directing a fantastic group of actors in an evening of theater featuring the diverse, powerful stories of this leaderless movement in a different kind of forum: The Occupy Wall Street Cabaret at Joe’s Pub.

I admit it can sometimes feel awkward to do more documenting of the OWS movement than actual occupying itself, and I tend to find myself in a bit of a conundrum. I question what can feel like my peripheral, objective participation in this critical community effort. I wonder how my creative work can offer an effective contribution to this movement. I look for how my dialogue with this cultural moment might reach beyond creating a forum of validation and catharsis for people on the inside of the movement. I ask: How can the work be impactful to those on the outside—those who don’t feel inspired to occupy Zuccotti Park, who won’t drop everything to Occupy The Highway from NYC to DC, who won’t be photographed at the barricades linking arms in a human chain, risking possible arrest or injury? How might visibility and credibility outshine the demoralizing impact of denied constitutional rights and police brutality that can so elusively steal the focus from the myriad messages of the movement? So many questions! I don’t know the answers.

But maybe the answers can live somewhere in the act of holding a different kind of space for the vital immediacy of this movement. An intimate space of quiet and undivided attention. Of celebration and reflection. Confession and testimonial. Where voices are heard, amplified, and perhaps even underscored. Maybe it’s a space where a community gathers to wrestle with the layers of contradictions one always finds within any intelligent, articulate, political discourse. Or a space that values the ephemeral moments that tend to be forgotten, without a photograph or a youtube or a blog post to prove they ever happened in the first place. A space where artists offer themselves as conduits for these voices to be heard. A kind of artistic home, perhaps, that can shapeshift between being a tent in Zuccotti park, a living room in Omaha, a general assembly in West Palm Beach, or a candlelit cabaret table at Joe’s Pub.

I want to talk about one of the most inspiring threads of the Occupy Movement that shifted my paradigm of what I thought “home” could mean in America. I’m talking about Occupy Our Homes, a group fighting to renegotiate mortgages for homeowners facing eviction in homes at risk of foreclosure. Vacant, foreclosed homes have been reclaimed and occupied in an effort to popularize the idea of housing as a human right.  And this effort is spreading like wildfire, nationwide.

Below is an excerpt from an interview transcript performed at our OWS Cabaret, describing the experience of an NYC actor who joined forces with Occupy Our Homes:

“I went to the occupy homes yesterday in Brooklyn ... Occupy worked with a bunch of community groups from um from East New York.  Because East New York has the most foreclosures -- five times the amount of foreclosures than New York State has. It's – the, the bankers have gutted it. They have gutted that place.  I mean every other house is vacant.  So what OWS and these community groups did was, um, uh, get together, pick a family, pick a foreclosed home -- it wasn't their home, but it had stood empty for three years, and occupied it, went in with a crew of carpenters, people who were cleaning with this family, and ... had had them occupy the house.”

Now there’s a beautiful definition of this thing called home: An impromptu community of strangers taking shifts to help occupy a house so a family can safely keep a roof over their heads. Below the interviewed party describes the most epic housewarming party one could ever imagine:

“There were probably about five, six hundred people there.  With signs, and banners, and and a brass band, and so we, we stopped at several houses on the way ... um, and the people would come out and talk to us. And say 'I'm in foreclosure.  I've been in foreclosure for two years.' And then they would tell their story, and we would people's mic it, you know. And then we arrived at our final destination.  With this family, people brought gifts, because, um, like one of the councilwomen said, she's like 'We brought house warming gifts cause that's what you do.  When you move in’.”

If you are interested to see what a housewarming like that looks like, I’ve included a link to a video of this amazing convergence in East New York:



This is another posting from occupyourhomes.org with some great footage of the children discovering the huge crowd of supporters and the brass band outside their window:




In the R & D piece I’ve been developing, some characters have emerged that are no doubt inspired by the heavy amount of OWS dialoging that’s been happening. In one scene, Occupy The Highway cyclists and fulltime RVers meet and discover an unlikely kinship in their reclamation of the open road as their home. Whether I’m writing about ex-deadheads and anarchists sipping beers and arguing politics in an RV lot in Tucson, or a councilwoman bringing housewarming gifts to a family occupying a vacant house in East New York, I suppose I’ve only just begun to peel back the layers of what it means to try to find our way home in America today.

If you missed the OWS Cabaret, you can check out the video here!

Post by Mia Rovegno

OCCUPY: Inside The Movement - POC Caucus

The Civilians are just one day away from re-occupying Joe's Pub with Let Me Ascertain You: Occupy Wall Street, Part II! Tickets have been going fast, but you can still get them here. If you're not in the area or you can't make the show, we will be live streaming here - so tune in!

If you've been following the blog, you know we're featuring material from our over 100 interviews with people of varying involvement in the movement on January 13th at 9:30 PM at Joe's Pub. And you also know that there was no way we could fit all of the great stories we collected into one hour. So - we're using the blog as a way to showcase some of the other great material we have in our Occupy archive, material that you won't find at Joe's Pub on Friday, or anywhere else (yet!).

One Civilians artist interviewed Manissa Maharawal, who you might have seen in New York Magazine talking with Eliot Spitzer. Among other things, Manissa is involved with the People of Color Caucus in the movement. Here she tells a story of what happened when she and a group of her friends were at their first GA, and the organizers were getting ready to issue one of the movement's first public statements:

"I mean we're excited about this thing, but this is going to be like the document coming from the movement, then ... it can't .. we're - we're all saying that it can't go out saying that ‘We. Are. All. One. Race. Human Race.  Formerly divided by race class gender religion.’  Right?  Like, we know what they're going for, but like ... that's ignoring all sorts of like real problems.  That come up in society, but also like come up in activist worlds all the time.  And that reproduce themselves because we ignore them.  Right?  And so like, we said it, and they're like 'ok ok, email us about it' and we were like ... 'No.  Like we want this changed right now.' You know?  And so ... like the process kept happening, and then they were like are their any blocks?  And ... my friend and I looked at each other, and she was like 'Block.'   And I was like, but like -- if you've been in like consensus crowds that are just like ... blocking is not like something you do because you feel like it. You know?  It's like no one's stopping this whole process.  It cannot move forward unless you take up my concern.  You know, it's like a really, like it's a big deal.   It takes like a l-- it's mad responsibility.  And I was like I can't believe I'm gonna like stand here in front of like hundreds of people ... and block this thing.  And it's like ... you know, it's like Everyone's Gonna Hate Me.  (laughing) You know? Like literally. And I was like, well, I've got my friends who are like with me, and other people around us had been like listening to our conversation, and we just felt like literally like, the whole like, we wanted to make the point, because we felt like if everyone just got the point we were trying to make? They would be like, oh, yeah, totally.  You know?  And we just hadn't had, we felt like we hadn't had a chance to like explain ourselves properly because they're really trying to push this thing through, so I blocked it."

OCCUPY: Inside the Movement - Interoccupy

Let Me Ascertain You: Occupy Wall Street is back with Part II, on January 13, 2012 at 9:30 PM at Joe's Pub (tickets here)!

Civilians artists conducted over 100 interviews, but the cabaret is only an hour! Which means we have a lot of great material that we can't perform on the 13th. So, we're featuring exclusive material here on the blog that you won't find at Joe's Pub on Friday, from interviews conducted with a range of people connected to the heart of the movement. 

Here are excerpts from an interview with one of the first organizers of Interoccupy, which she describes as:

"But, um, Interoccupy, basically, what it’s trying to do- and it is doing this - is um, setting up a place for the occupations across the country to talk to each other and collaborate on projects- whatever… whether that be direct actions or more policy kind of things, you know um, demands, that kind of stuff."

And here she talks about one of the big questions post-raid - is Occupy more than just Zuccotti Park?

"It's a battle of economics, politics, and then just like social... Social.  Living.  Social justice..  And then, and then you have the camp, it's like you have the site itself.  It starts to become its own world, and its own politics, and you know.  And then, it's like well, what do we care more about?  Do we care more about the camp?  Or do we care more about what the camp represents, like, on a philosophical level.  I, I think that there's a lot of value to having a physical place where people went.  I mean there was a reason why tourists went down there, you know what I'm saying?  It's not just to look at the animals in the zoo, although that was probably some of it, but I think also, it was like, I know that I could go down there, and have conversation with a perfect stranger.  And they might be crazy, but most- a lot of times they weren't.  You know what I mean?  You could have actual exchanges with people, and I don't remember that happening at any other time in the city.  And I've been here for 20 years.  It doesn't happen.So I feel like that in and of itself is a huge success, you know, and, and... then it caught on in such a gigantic way.   It's like everywhere, like, every country, there's one of these things happening.  It's actually pretty hopeful."

LET ME ASCERTAIN YOU, OWS PART II: Inside The Movement

A lot has happened in the Occupy movement since The Civilians occupied Joe's Pub on October 28th, 2011. And so - get ready for round 2! Let Me Ascertain You: Occupy Wall Street is back at Joe's Pub on January 13, 2012 at 9:30 PM with a whole new round of interviews from across the Occupy spectrum. For the past few months we've had interviewers out in the streets (and parks and plazas and public atria) of New York City getting the stories of over 100 protesters. The aftermath of  the Zuccotti Park raid? We were there. December 6th Occupy Home Foreclosures? We were there. Occupy Broadway? We were there! (And not just to perform.) Check past blog posts for highlights from those events and many others.

We've also been working our way inside the movement, to get the stories of people who have been organizing and strategizing day in and day out - to hear not only what's been going on, but also to find out their opinions and predictions on the future of Occupy.

In order to gear up for the 2nd installment of Let Me Ascertain You: Occupy Wall Street at Joe's Pub on January 13th, 2012 (tickets here) we're featuring material from people who've had a key role in the development of the movement. These excerpts are CIVILIANS BLOG EXCLUSIVES from material that we won't have time to feature in the cabaret. So, keep an eye on the blog and get ready for January 13th!

Mary Notari was fired from her job for pretending to be a spokesperson for the Bloomberg administration at at protest event, as part of Yes Men performance (watch that video here). She told The Civilians about her experience:

"What ended up happening with the way the media responded to it was wholly unexpected as well. I don't think we expected it to make much of a splash. Because it just seemed too ridiculous for anyone to take it seriously at all. But apparently not. Because the point of the action was never to fool the media. It was never to fool anyone, except maybe the police, and maybe Bloomberg. But like, it was just supposed to be a satire, like, oh look at this ridiculous, these ridiculously contradictory things. Like, I don't think at any point, we really expected people to be fooled by it. And honestly, on the ground, people weren't. For like, maybe 15 minutes, people were like, 'What is this?' Like, really? But then all it took was someone texting Stu Loesser, and him saying, 'No. I don't know—there's no one by that name.'

Stu Loesser is the, um, press secretary for the Bloomberg administration. He tweeted—and this is of course why he's press secretary. Tweeting's such an art, and I haven't mastered it yet. Um, he just—on Sunday afternoon that we did it, he said, 'I'm going into the train. For the next hour, please no one impersonate any members of my staff.'"

Keep an eye on The Civilians Blog for more exclusive excerpts from over 100 interviews. And get your tickets for Let Me Ascertain You: Occupy Wall Street, Part II on January 13th!

This Week In Occupy

Last month's removal of occupiers from Zuccotti Park left a lot of people wondering what's next for the Occupy movement - is it true what protesters' signs claim, that "you can't evict an idea," or was the symbolic home a central part of Occupy's efficacy? As the Movement continues to change and its dynamics shift, The Civilians' artists are out documenting the process, as told by its participants, at Occupy GAs and events around New York City.

From an interview one artist conducted with a retiree visiting the GA from Florida, on what he thinks about the future of the movement:  

"Yeah, it's difficult to know, because I mean the movement could fail! The movement could sputter out and - and - and, at least in a lot of places. And every, you know, a lot of us are gonna hedge our bets. I mean, I, like I said, I'm a semi-retired person. I just am lucky enough to have a period in my life where I have a lot of time and I don't have to, you know I only spend a little bit of it making money. And so I spend half of my time as a union organizer for the faculty union in Florida, right? That's what I've been doing for the last two or three years. So I'm takin' time away from THAT for THIS....Anyway, um, so yeah, I guess - I guess what I want on an ind-just on a personal level is to have the movement become VIABLE enough that I, I...it's still worth me taking time away from other important things as well, you know? (Laughs) And that's really, uh, that's uh, a tall order. That's a tall order. You know, it's, um, and you know, it's the, uh... we don't really know where this is going. And its...sometimes it just, it makes me crazy - and I'm sure there's a lot of very smart and very able people who have walked AWAY from it, and we gotta figure out how to get a lot of those people back."

And here's a conversation with an actor who helped co-ordinate Occupy Broadway, on her performing at the event (click here if you missed the post about The Civilians' performance at Occupy Broadway!):

"I did some, uh, dramatic karaoke. (Laughs) So, it's this awesome idea, and I was so glad to see it -  because I had this idea - like, okay, joking with my friends -  like saying song lyrics, like you know, (dramatic voice) "At first I was afraid. I was petrified. Kept thinking I could never live without you by  my side." So you know, that kind of thing - I used to joke with friends with that. And so tonight I was like, "Oh my God! Dramatic karaoke! I gotta do that." So, I did, um, a Rage Against the Machine song, um, "Bulls on Parade" - I don't - I wasn't too familiar with the song, "Come wit it now, come wit it now, come wit it now," and then there's this, um, I wish I could remember it, but, um, it ends with "bulls on parade." Which is so funny you know - bears, bulls wall street, you know? So, yeah there was a line in there about, um, about libraries and how they you know - about being reduced to rubble and the books being burned, which is you know very relevant to what happened with the raid."

OWS Project: Notes From The Field

It's been a big week for the Occupy Wall Street movement and The Civilians artists have been out in the parks and squares interviewing people on the front lines.

Late Monday night/early Tuesday morning occupiers were evicted from Zuccotti Park in the middle of the night. Here's a snippet from an interview by one of our artists with a protester who was in the park when it happened:

"Uh, this morning they came in at one o’clock, they surrounded us with light trucks, big, uh, high beam light trucks, and, um, announced that they we constituted a fire hazard and public safety issues. Uh, they surrounded the camp, maybe a hundred and twenty we’re estimating and, uh, very cordially, uh, for about two and a half hours had media--mediators explain to us the situation and what our options were. During the course of that time we all rallied around our kitchen, which is the center in the heart of our - of our camp and, uh, several of our members, six of them, used u-locks to chain themselves together around the neck, so that they could not be moved without hurting them. Um, and then, as they advanced, they, uh, they tore down tents and tossed everything aside, a sanitation team came in and collected all of our belongings safely and put them in dump truck pressing devices. After about, uh, two and a half hours, around three thirty five, they, uh, they started arresting people. "

On Thursday, protesters responded en masse around the city (and the country) for the National Day of Action ending up at Foley Square. Signs and chants reflected the message "you can't evict an idea." One 75 year old woman at the march, who made note of the fact that she also marched with Dr. King, said:

"I think it's time now to fight back and kick the rich in the butt, you know what I'm saying? Kick them back- and this is a good showing. If they do this all over this country, for the next 6 weeks to 6 months, it's going to make a change, I guarantee you - they're going to come out like they did in '67 after the riots in Newark and put some kind of programs in place, only this time they're going to create some jobs, you hear me?"

And her friend said about being out at Foley Square:

"I'm the only one in my family, [and] my mother, the rest of them are so apolitical. I don't know what planet they're on, but they don't know they benefitted, everybody has benefitted in this country from what other people have done in the streets, historically."

As Occupy movement changes nationally and in NYC, The Civilians will be out there documenting, so keep an eye on the blog for more notes from the field as our project and the movement evolves!

If you missed the OWS cabaret at Joe's Pub, click here to watch it or read the article in the NYTimes.

Watch the Occupy Wall Street Cabaret!

The Civilians' Let Me Ascertain You: Occupy Wall Street Cabaret was last Friday, and it went great! We couldn't be prouder of our fantastic artists for pulling together to create such a wonderful show (and so quickly - interviews began just a few weeks ago)!

We got a great write-up from The Faster Times, who said that "The 80-minute show was the most moving work of theater I have seen all season." Read the whole article here!

We are so happy to announce that the entire show is available! Watch the videos posted here, or check out a snapshot from an interview posted below!

Watch live streaming video from joespub at livestream.com

Watch live streaming video from joespub at livestream.com

Watch live streaming video from joespub at livestream.com

Fate is a 19 year old in youthful, punkish clothing. She tells us what brings her to OWS and what it's like living there:

“I came out here with my boyfriend and my friends? But um…all I really love about this is …we’re making a point. We’re standing up for what we believe in and at the end of the day, you know, we still have our heads up…we still have hope. Hopefully none of these freaking PIGS (gestures to police) mess it up.

Well, being here my day is…is peaceful. Yeah, it is hard to sleep …early...but you know, everyone’s like, “Yeah come on,” everyone’s like rowdy, like “Yeah protestors” and it’s like, you gotta be up. We clean up, we put the blankets back so other people can use them. We eat. Uh. Our spots change all the time. There are people that are coming in from different states and different countries, so we have to make a little bit more room for them. And. That’s basically like…it’s like guests, coming into our home. This is our home. And we’re trying to make it look suitable…to people.”

SNAPSHOTS FROM OCCUPY WALL STREET: Maddy

The latest installment of our quarterly cabaret series Let Me Ascertain You is getting closer! For this one, The Civilians have been out doing interviews at Occupy Wall Street. Here on the blog we've been posting some sneak peak preview material from interviews the artists have been doing. To hear the rest of this story, and many more come to the cabaret at Joe's Pub on October 28th! More info and tickets HERE!


Maddy is a young woman with dyed candy apple red hair. We caught up with her while she was painting a coffee-house art style painting in Zuccotti Park.


REGARDING THE COMMUNITY THAT HAS SPRUNG UP IN THE PARK:

“But, yeah I feel like these people are my family. We share - my mother thinks I'm crazy when I talk about my political views, and when I'm here everyone's like, 'Yeah, that makes perfect sense, yeah,' and that's great to feel like people, that I'm not crazy. And school, I go to like a small Catholic school, I proposed the idea of not using money in society and some girl freaked out and went 'But I need to pay my bills.' She failed to recognize that if we lived in a society without money there wouldn't be bills, but I don't know, maybe I'm not crazy, I'm just smarter than her, I don't know.”

Be sure to check out our features about the interview process and the role of art in the movement in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal!

And if you can't make the cabaret on Friday, it'll be streaming live online! HERE is the link that will allow you to watch the performance at 7:30PM EST! 

SNAPSHOTS FROM OCCUPY WALL STREET: Wezel

In anticipation of our upcoming cabaret, Let Me Ascertain You:Occupy Wall Street, we're posting some sneak peak previews of material from interviews used for the cabaret. This is an excerpt from an interview with Wezel, a farmer in his 70s with some interesting thoughts on the situation. To get the rest of his story and many others, come to the cabaret at Joe's Pub on October 28th! More info and tickets HERE!

“I’ve got a sixth grade education. You’re talkin’ to the wrong man. We need to reform our judicial system, our penal system - the whole medical thing is a disaster.  My wife and I, we’re in our sixties and seventies, ah, we’re fucked. No, we can’t, how could we, you know? We live on a thousand dollars a month, we couldn’t afford insurance.  So I get social security, my wife is 63, so we’re still waiting, and she lost her job. Her school closed down. She’s an art teacher. They completely shut the school down, she lost her insurance, and then she had a heart attack. So, so we have-  we don’t owe any money to anybody in the world except the hospital, about 50,000 dollars.  Well, when you live on a thousand dollars a month, that’s a lot of money for us.  And, uh, we thought Obama was gonna fix it-but…

A little bit at a time.  We go an’ dive dumpsters, an’ grow most of our own food, but it puttin’ us in a bind - but we still love it. We love (smiling) our country livin’, an’ we have a good life. We-look at our children, ya know? An’ our - one of our daughters is- is pretty well - doing a big thing in North Carolina. She’s had meetings with the police chief and the county commissioners, so we can occupy a park there. She also has a vegan restaurant, so she is feeding everybody, hundreds of people a day.  So yeah it’s- it’s a- life’s good."  

For more information about the investigative method and occupy wall street, check out our feature in the Washington Post HERE and the Wall Street Journal HERE!

Plus, we're working on bringing some of our interviewees to the theater! A donation of $15 buys one ticket for a protester. Click HERE! 

SNAPSHOTS FROM OCCUPY WALL STREET: Michele

Last week, we introduced you to some of the people interviewed by Civilians' Artists at the Occupy Wall Street Protest. This week, as Let Me Ascertain You: Occupy Wall Street draws nearer, we're going to give you a sneak peak at some of the characters who you'll find at Joe's Pub on the 28th, here on the blog!

The cabaret is on October 28 at 7:30PM at Joe's Pub (425 Lafayette Street in Manhattan). To purchase tickets, click HERE!

Michele is a longtime New York activist who has been going to the protest since day 3. She was arrested in the Brooklyn Bridge march. Here's a preview from her interview:

“I just decided, you know, the Brooklyn Bridge is a big monument; everybody across the country is going to know what the Brooklyn Bridge is. And, I didn’t want to get arrested, like I promised my partner I wasn’t going to get arrested. From the beginning, the second I went down to Wall Street, “Oh, don’t worry I’ve been doing this forever, I don’t want – I’m tired of getting arrested,” but I’m telling you, the energy at that moment - and people started saying, “Let’s take the bridge,” and then people started singing and dancing, you know? That chant that says you know, “Go up, go down there is revolution in this town”, and we literally just like started dancing out on the bridge and it was just – it was impossible to not do it, you know? And it just- it just- it was like, okay, maybe this is going to get the media’s attention, because up until that point there really hadn’t been anything except, I think it was the Daily News that had the cover of that woman’s cleavage, you know, with the police holding the woman down, you know? That unfortunate photo. Um, so anyways, uh, you know, we went out onto the bridge and I just accepted it and I was like okay, we’re going to get arrested and – and this – I hope it’s worth it, and, uh, and it was.” 

Stay tuned to the blog for more interview excerpts coming next week!

And to check out our awesome feature in The Washington Post, click HERE! The reporter, Peter Marks, talked to Steve and to our Associate Artist Greg McFadden about the creative process, investigative theater, and conducting interviews for our Occupy Wall Street cabaret. He even spent some time with Greg out at Zuccotti Park while he talked to some of the protesters! Check it out!

The Civilians Occupy Wall Street

Over the past few weeks, Civilians' artists have been downtown talking to the 99% about the current demonstrations, our government, the economy, and the future. The company's next cabaret evening in its Let Me Ascertain You series will take this interview material and reveal the thought-provoking and unexpected, the infuriating and hilarious, the communal and the personal stories of the large and ongoing display of discontent that is Occupy Wall Street. Don't miss this one-night-only performance of monologues and songs by Michael Friedman crafted from interviews in The Civilians' unique style, giving voice to the people and examining the current exercise of democracy that will leave its mark our nation's history.

The cabaret is on October 28 at 7:30PM at Joe's Pub (425 Lafayette Street in Manhattan). To purchase tickets, click HERE!

Here are some excerpts from the interviews we've done so far:

FORMER INVESTMENT BANKER ON WHY HE'S THERE:

"We, the 99%, that’s who, you know everyone who isn’t putting in these policies and – and benefitting from them... the federal reserve for instance [is a] privatized bank which we’re not allowed, uh, even to audit, you know, our government, yet they print our money. But they have no resources and they’re not federal, they’re privatized, and we have to borrow that money from them on loan when section – Article 1, Section 8 of The Constitution, uh, prohibits anyone else from coining money except for Congress, so, you know in that way the wealth would stay with the nation, but what happens is the wealth gets siphoned out of the nation and all the resources get siphoned out of the relation and a few bankers are – are pocketing that money." 

A YOUNG MAN ON HOW TO GET THERE:
"I hitchhiked here all the way from California to get out here for this protest...Um, so what you do, is a lot of people use a cardboard sign, uh white cardboard if you can get it, because it stands out more, but my friend got me a wonderful gift years ago, which was a white, a white – like a dry erase board so that way I could express myself at any given moment or if I wanted to take a new route, I could change it or I could just like write funny shit on there and try to get a laugh out of people . Um, and I – I used that, I have a backpacking backpack that I loaded up with all of my gear, and I carried with me a lawn gnome on the back, which is an unnecessary 10 pounds, but my friend gave it to me and was like take this with you on your journey this time and we named him “Gnome Chomsky” and currently he’s sleeping over there on my bed..."

VIETNAM VET ON THE MEDIA:

"I said I would've been arrested, I would've done it just just to a say wait a second this is what democracy's supposed to be about you know we're supposed to do this, that's what brought this country together, you know, and then you got people, that's what I'm saying, the news people really disappoint.  I even heard O'Reilly, I haven't heard O'Reilly say What are we going to do about these people, you know, I thought O'Reilly at least was going to say Hey, this is what America is all about, but he's a punk, he keeps talking telling everybody how tough he is, you know?  I'm Bill O'Reilly and I'm a I'm a tough guy. No he's not.  He's a sissy. He ran away from Vietnam, too. Tell him that if you ever see him."

  

SEND AN OCCUPY WALL STREET PROTESTER TO THE THEATER!

Donate $15 to send one demonstrator to the show! 

Please click the link below to make a donation of $15 or more and we’ll invite actively protesting members of the 99% to witness their stories being told. 

Colombian Drug Trafficking

Steve and his team of artists have continued the process of conducting research and interviews for the BOGOTÁ PRISON PAGEANT at the national women's prison in Bogotá, Colombia. The women are in prison for many different reasons, but one of the more prevalent crimes is that of drug trafficking. In the movie "Maria Full of Grace," the mulas (women trafficking drugs - mules is the literal translation) swallow the cocaine in packages made of condoms. It seems that this method no longer works, since anyone suspected of carrying drugs is x-rayed at the airport.  Now the traffickers have ways of blending the cocaine into clothing, shoes, whatever. You can open a suitcase and everything looks perfectly normal, but then you'll find that all of the fabrics are actually made of drugs. Most of the mulas are paid and know what they're doing, but it does seem that some are tricked into carrying drugs. Apparently, one tactic in international trafficking is to send a group of mulas to the airport at the same time and set one of them up to get caught who is either knowingly or unknowingly carrying a smaller amount of drugs. The narcos pay off the police and the airport, and the set-up mula gets arrested with the smaller amount. The other mulas who've got the bulk of the stash pass through safely and fly off to deliver the goods.

In an interview with one of the mulas, she described this process to Steve and the artists, giving them one of their favorite lines:

"Cuando la policía detuvo, me sentía absolutamente ningún miedo. Solo pánico."

"When the police arrested me, I felt absolutely no fear. Only panic."

The Adult Entertainment Industry and Online Technology - in connection with PRETTY FILTHY

New York Magazine's cover story HERE this week is about the adult entertainment industry and the internet - a topic also explored in PRETTY FILTHY! This article has a lot of info about how the business-side of the industry has developed online (see the diagram on page 2), and asks, how detrimental is free internet porn to the industry?

One of our interviewees for PRETTY FILTHY, Sunny Leone, was interviewed for the article:
'“Tubes are going to destroy our industry,” says Sunny Leone, 29, an Indian-American knockout who is celebrating eight nominations this evening. “Fans don’t understand that if they don’t pay for porn, we can’t make a living. They’ll have to watch crazy European porn.”'

Or maybe the internet hasn't been so detrimental?
"People who consume only free porn, [Feras Antoon, current CEO of The Brazzers] argues, are people who, in the past, would not have consumed any. The people who paid for porn then will still pay for it now. Plus the tube sites have so vastly enlarged the total universe of porn consumers that the number of those who pay has ballooned along with it. Ten years ago, total daily adult-site traffic averaged less than 1 million unique visitors—on the entire Internet; today Manwin’s tube sites alone get 42 million daily uniques."

Here is what one of our interviewees for PRETTY FILTHY said to us about this issue:
"I’m working... maybe twice a month and that’s a lot compared to what people are getting these days. There’s been a lot of girls that’s been “I’m going to retire...”  I think it comes from the fact that so much porn is free now.  You can go to “Red Tube” or “You Porn” or whatever you want to and there’s porn on demand.  Somebody sent me a little email, “This is my favorite clip of you” and I clicked on the link and it went directly into... [a] scene, no click on yes to enter if you’re over eighteen, no enter your credit card to make sure that you’re completely liable.  I’m sitting there, free link, full forty minute scene of me...  For free!  I’ve got kids and that is not something I want my child to be able to go click, “Oh, look at this, there’s Mommy.”  I’m very protective, I am."

For more about this, be sure not to miss our cabaret at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, A PRETTY FILTHY EVENING, this Saturday, Feb. 5. More info HERE!

IN THE FOOTPRINT: Featured Video

How about a blog post about bloggers?



"Norman Oder - do you know him? He does the Atlantic Yards Report blog. He has a theory, that Brooklyn would be a large city in another place in the United States, it would have one or two papers, and they would have fully staffed newsrooms. He, he quotes another media person who says nowhere else in the United States are more people served by so little media. But we do have a lot of bloggers. One thing I think of as like the bloggers, I kinda think of - we're like a Greek chorus, basically. We tell people what's really going on. You could do like a Greek chorus in your show!"

Click here for an article by Norman Oder in his blog about the recent Atlantic Yards reporting.

More Atlantic Yards-related blog links to the right of this entry in "My Blog List."

Can you handle all the meta happening in this post?

When was the first time you held a gun? - LET ME ASCERTAIN YOU: CRIME, USA

"So, I’m in first grade, and I’m talking shit to three, four dudes in the class – 'I’ll take all of you on.' You know, I’ve got that Kung Fu movie I just watched on Saturday in my brain and anyone from the east coast knows about the Kung Fu movies back in the day, Saturdays at three o’clock, channel 5, so, you see that – you beating up everybody on the block. So, here I am – I’m talking mad shit now to these dudes, and after school, like I’m thinking they’re going to come at me like in the Kung Fu movies – one at a time. All three of them jumped on my little ass and I just felt it, just raining on me. So I came home, and I was crying, man, I wanted revenge, I wanted to get a knife from my mom’s kitchen and all this shit. And she said, 'What happened?' I said, 'Well, you know – these boys they jumped on me...' What ever. And she said 'Why?' And I said, 'Well, I told them I could fight ‘em.' And she said, 'Well, that’s what your ass gets.' So I learned what happens in the movies and what happens in reality is a whole different thing.

I can remember the first time I carried a gun, I walked with a gun. I was fourteen. I was fourteen, I had held guns when I was like ten, eleven, twelve – but like when I had my own gun, I was fourteen. And that is a very paranoid – like you’re so paranoid having a gun in your hand. It’s one thing when you see like all the older dudes carrying around, when you have it – it’s like, ok – you think the whole world knows that you have this on you. You build up that attitude of like, 'Ok, I’ve got a fucking gun.'"

-Former gang member and interviewee

For more info about LET ME ASCERTAIN YOU: CRIME, USA (this Thursday at Joe's Pub!), click here!

IN THE FOOTPRINT: Featured Video

Here is a video from our workshop production of IN THE FOOTPRINT, which was at the Brooklyn Lyceum in 2008 (under the title Brooklyn at Eye Level). This is from an interview with the President of the Youth Council Atlantic Terminal Community Center.







"If they build a stadium, that's OK. I have no problem. Cause I could come outta my house and go watch a game. Live. That's no problem. But what about the seniors in this building, the elderly? Come on now."

Who Is Mikhail Prokhorov? - IN THE FOOTPRINT

For those of you who came to LET ME ASCERTAIN YOU: ATLANTIC YARDS, you know that Mikhail Prokhorov owns a controlling share in the New Jersey Nets (soon to be re-named) and that he is six feet, eight inches tall. He was recently named New York's Best Oligarch by the Village Voice. Let's get to know our 45-year-old Russian billionaire a little better, shall we?

According to a New York Times feature about him that came out today, he put $200 million towards 80 percent of the franchise and 45 percent of the long-delayed Barclays Center arena in Brooklyn, where the Nets will play beginning in 2012. Prokhorov also agreed to cover some $60 million in operational costs and 80 percent of $207 million in debt. He says for the article, "Money doesn’t drive me... New ideas, the feeling of team spirit, mean more. To create a team better than any other, that’s what drives me. To find the idea is one thing; to realize the idea is another."
Lots more info about him in the article HERE.

HERE is a video tour of his Moscow home (described in the NY Times article), a web extra connected to the feature story about him on 60 Minutes.

One of our interviewees said of him: "Prokhorov is, made his money, in the nickel mining industry. He made a ton of money, built a big company with another partner. In whatever year it was, 2006-2007, there’s a whole hooker scandal in France, where he brings in hookers and is arrested and incarcerated for 4 days, until the charges are dismissed and he’s let go. After that, his partner and the Kremlin force him to sell his interest in this big international nickel consortium. He does. He cashes out. That looks like it’s the end of him as a Russian oligarch and then all of the sudden, the market crashes, he’s got tons more money than all the others because he had cashed out. He’s a- he’s a guy who’s 6’9”, he played basketball in grade school, this idea that he played in high school, you know, some player who never really quite made it isn’t really true. He’s not as athletic as he wants people to think. He’s more of a kick-boxer, exerciser, pilates guy, than he’s a basketball player."