COMMUNITY PROJECTS AND HIGH ART
My
Pizza, My Idea!
Colloquial Disforum
Go to the Chateau
Mommy-Side Up
The Missoula Oblongata Shakespeare Repertory Theatre
The
Heartbreak Café
All along, The
Missoula Oblongata has had a specific interest not only in creating theater
for diverse audiences, but also in making performances with outsider performers—visual
artists, shopkeepers, children, bike mechanics, and even moms. When not on
tour, the company dedicates time and energy to creating performances and facilitating
events that give community members an opportunity to experiment with creation
and performance and to connect with working artists.
Some of these events were so well-loved when they debuted, that they’ve
since spun off and now have lives of their own. The Missoula Oblongata Shakespeare
Repertory Theatre and The Colloquial Disforum have both been appropriated
by the original participants and are taking place around the country without
us. Hurray!
Below is an incomplete, but fairly comprehensive list of all of our projects
that are neither mainstage or side-shows. Many of these are conceptual, experimental,
ecstatic, and weird. In short, they require a more detailed explanation than
we can realistically put here. Please contact us if you’d like more
information about a specific project, or if you would like to bring one of
these projects to your town. Also, please be aware that we usually have several
new ideas percolating at any given time, so this list is bound to grow, and
that growth is generally dependent on potential collaborators coming forward
and identifying themselves. All of which is to say that if you couldn’t
care less about our heaps of rave reviews, because what you really want is
something new and fresh that we’ve never tried before anywhere else
- if all you’d really like is for The Missoula Oblongata to come to
your town/venue/house to stage a concept-driven adaptation of Dante’s
Inferno in which you play Virgil and we create the River Styx in your driveway,
write to us immediately! Propose already! Don’t be left on the waiting
list!
The list:
My Pizza, My Idea!: A surrealist pizza delivery
service conceived by Connor Kizer. Details about this project can be found
on the “History”
page.
Colloquial Disforum: An evening of speeches and
lectures in which 10 participants present speeches they haven’t written
on topics which the writers didn’t choose.
Go to the Chateau: A play by Madeline ffitch,
performed for an audience of two people at a time. The play takes place in
a moving car and is site-specific to Northampton, Massachusetts.
Mommy-Side Up: An evening of stand-up comedy,
performed on Mothers’ Day. 10 participants perform stand-up comedy routines
that their mothers wrote for them
The Missoula Oblongata Shakespeare Repertory Theatre: A play by William
Shakespeare is divided up into its five acts. Each act is given to an artist
(or non-artist), who must present some kind of representation of the act which
is no longer than 20 minutes. The acts are presented in order, often in different
spaces.
The Heartbreak Café: A member of the public
enters an installation which appears to be a romantic restaurant. A performer
sits down at the table across from them and unceremoniously dumps the member
of the public. One or both of them storms out, heartbroken.
