Susan Simpson

An original puppet play by Susan Simpson tracing the footsteps of The Ditto Sisters, identical triplet troubadors who enter the city of

Los Angeles and set off a wave of architectural and perhaps human replication. A creation myth for our city, in which characters multiply

and contract, and generations of artificial bodies mimic and intermingle with one another.

Written and Directed by Susan Simpson

Puppet Design: Susan Simpson

Original Music by Emily Lacy and Eric Lindley

Costume Design by Sarah Brown

Lighting Design by Kristy Baltezore

Scenic Design by Susan Simpson with Alison Heimstead

Performed by Marsian De Lellis, Jackie Knox, Katie Shook, Kendra Ware. and Anne Yatco

Press

Lead Feet and Nothing Upstairs: A History of the Lifelike, a piece that radicalizes and reinvents the notion of puppet theater" - F. Kathleen Foley, LA Times

Los Angeles Times, June 14, 2007, "Mythmaking for Adults", by F. Kathleen Foley http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jun/15/entertainment/et-stage15

Los Angeles Times, June 3, 2007, "Propagating Puppets" by Diane Haithman, http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jun/03/entertainment/ca-simpson3

Concrete Folk Variations urban folktale  set in the lesbian bars of McCarthy era Los Angeles. Originally a three episode puppet play mapping the labyrinthine culture of 1940's Silver Lake - secret codes, clandestine homosexual societies, flamboyant transgressions and soul crushing silence. Concrete Folk is performed with small-scale puppets, projections, and a minimalist mid-century Los Angeles cityscape. The show appeared regularly at The Manual Archives in 2008 and 2009, as well as at the Santa Monica Museum and the Great Small Works Toy Theater Festival in Brooklyn. Puppets from the play were exhibited at the Sheehan Gallery at Whitman College in 2009. It is currently being adapted into a graphic book. 

Written, Directed and Designed by Susan Simpson

Recent performance Dates:

Los Angeles, May 2-11

at AUTOMATA

Press:

L.A. Weekly, March 14, 2008, "Concrete Folk Variations: Death of a Sugar Daddy" by Amy Nicholson 

LAist, March 17, 2008 "A Play About Puppets That Do Terrible Things to Each Other" by Ross Lincoln

KCRW May 6, 2014, "Formally Excavating the Past" on Opening the Curtain by Anthony Byrnes

Hyperallergic, May 14, 2014 "Hard-Boiled Wooden Puppets" , Alicia Eler

Exhibit A is a multimedia performance inspired by the ephemera in the archives of Jim Kepner. It is rooted in the utopian visions of early gay organizing and in the language and aesthetics of science fiction. Jim Kepner was a writer and activist in the early years of the gay rights movement in Los Angeles. He was also an avid science fiction fan and occasional sci-fi writer. His archives are full of artifacts from both of these thriving subcultures. The overlapping rhetoric of the two communities speaks to the fantastical forward thinking that fueled both worlds.

This piece tells the story of a dry summer of 1948 in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. The reservoir is drained for repairs, Harry Hay and Rudi Gernrich are convening the first meetings of the Matachine society. John Lautner is surveying the site for a space age palace. Amidst the manifesto writing, initiation rights and walks around the dry reservoir, restless aliens wander modernist boxes and cottages of the hills exciting and disturbing inhabitants with unsettling acts of liberation. The Alien presence is met with a rush of pleasure and terror. Cataclysmic shifts in consciousness follow.

Exhibit A is performed with life-sized puppets around a replica of Silver Lake hills circa 1948. Live feed video of the action on stage is mixed with feed from miniature alien landscapes, constructing a live hand-made cinematic science fiction spectacle.

Concieved, Designed and Directed by Susan Simpson

Music by MKatz

Video Design by Gina Napolitan

Costume Design by Kate Mallor

Performances:

EXHIBIT A: Phase 1 Created in collaboration with Monica Oller, Katie Shook and Tom Petck

The Manual Archives, June 5-7,2009

Santa Barbara Forum for Contemporary Art, February 4, 2010

Rio Hondo College, Whittier, CA March 10, 2010

Links Hall, Banners and Cranks Festival, Chicago, IL May 7-9, 2010 (excerpt)

NOW Festival, REDCAT, Los Angeles CA, July 2012

Automata, Los Angeles, CA, April 25-May 5, 2013

Press:

Silver Lake's Gay Rights History ...As Told by Puppets, by Anna Jones, L.A. Weekly Blog, April 25, 2013 

LA Weekly Pick, 5 Artsy Things to do in LA, April 25, 2013 

Best be On Your Avant Garde, by Tony Frankel, Stage and Cinema, Aug 1, 2012http://www.stageandcinema.com/2012/08/01/redcat-now/

EXHIBIT A and the Incremental Power of Puppet Theater to Animate Hidden Histories

by Sylvia Sukop 2009 http://www.redcat.org/content/essay-exhibit

This project was made possible by generous support from The MAP Fund and The Jim Henson Foundation.

Conceived, Designed and Directed by Susan Simpson

Sound Design Composition by Sean Rooney
Music performed by Crispus
Lighting Design by Justin Townsend

Pseudoflora combines traditional marionette theater with the aesthetics of natural history dioramas, and architectural models. The story is inspired by the works of Bruno Shulz and transferred to the margins of Los Angeles sprawl. The show creates a portrait of L.A. which encompasses the rundown modernist box and the carefully nurtured gardens of the tropical desert. The setting reflects a story of quietly observed loss and the unexpected comfort of the strange, beautiful and artificial surroundings. An elliptical narrative follows a family through a hot summer as their business slowly sinks. A father suffers visions and hypersensitivity that give him the ability to ferret out pockets of the sublime. A mother immerses herself in a routine of fitness and re-hydration. Their son searches for the water his mother seeks and the wonder his father sees.
The performance takes place on a marionette stage built to reflect the architecture of typical Los Angeles apartment buildings. In the place of curtains there are sliding glass doors. These open to show anything from sweeping panoramas to small isolated details. The setting moves from a typical heavily stuccoed East Side street to the blank interior of an apartment to a nearly empty warehouse. Periodically the smaller windows open to reveal vivid blow-ups of the subliminal layer of the story.
Characters are hand-carved puppets. The figures are initially move in style imitative of human gesture, but this careful mimicry frequently disintegrates into mechanical loops, strange means of locomotion, or dead stillness. The result is the creation of a netherworld hovering between the animate and the inanimate.
There are words spoken sporadically, but the sound of the performance comes mainly from the band Crispus, who plays live throughout the show. Crispus, lead by composer Sean Rooney, combine instrumental music (clarinet, saxophone, guitar, unusual percussion, and toy piano) with processed sound samples. The resulting score is a collage of melodies and found sound that comes together to create an off beat, slightly abstract melancholia.

Written By Eric Ehn

Directed and Designed by Susan Simpson and Janie Geiser

Part 1 performed at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in May 2004
Part 2 Performed at the Velaslavasay Panorama in June 2005
Full Version performed at the Velaslavasay Panorama in October 2006, December 2007
and HERE Art Center, New York, NY January 2008

Frankenstein: Mortal Toys is a toy theater production of Eric Ehn’s contemplative and abstracted adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, told with the visual vocabulary of 19th century landscape painting, and portraiture. It is accompanied by the music of Severin Behnen. The voice of Frankenstein played by Chris Payne.

Read reviews

New York Times, January 14, 2008, "Down Sized: Eerie Tale Of a Man and His Monster" by Rachel Saltz 

Los Angeles Times, Dec 15, 2007 “Expressive Puppetry Helps Bring 'Frankenstein' to Life” by David Ng

L.A. Weekly, December 13, 2007 “Frankenstein (Mortal Toys): Small Wonder” by Holly Willis 

A Machine for Living is a sci-fi thriller. A work of live cinema performed with puppets and handmade special effects. Having absorbed errant extraterrestrial DNA, a Southern California artist slowly evolves into highly advanced alien other. As she receives revelations from her distant planet her body transforms. She finds herself capable a supernatural botanical reproduction that could transform the human race. Pursued as a biological terrorist she must decide her next steps.  

This work premiered at Automata in Los Angeles in spring of 2018, then returned for a two week run for LAX Live Arts Exchange Festival in October 2018

LA Magazine said of the show:

“A Machine for Living, an eerie, captivating tale combining classic L.A. noir with freaky botany-based sci-fi……. part outsider theater, part live cinema, and fully mind-boggling”

https://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/best-things-to-do-in-la-2018/

Also read:

Riting, Miwa Matreyek in conversation with Susan Simpson, October 17, 2018

Written, Directed and Designed by Susan Simpson

Video Design by Ting Zhang

Sound Design by Jesse Mandapat

Performed by Molly Allis and Moira MacDonald

Augustine September: Artist in Residence is a solo performance installation.  Augustine (a small scale puppet) takes up residence at a site. While in residence she paints pictures, writes stories, constructs costumes and creates dance performances. Augustine draws inspiration, from her environment. She incorporates objects gifted to her or found in her surroundings. She incorporates the soundscape of the site and sometimes finds content in the conversations that float by her.

Augustine was in a residence in a kiosk in the Far East Plaza in Chinatown, Los Angeles for three months in 2014. (see photos of her kiosk, her costumes and her paintings)

She has also performed at 

Tongva After Dark: Wonder Room, in Santa Monica, Oct, 2014

Lives Arts Exchange Festival, September, 2014

Bright Light Night Festival, November, 2014

Toy theater design for The Last Act of Lilka Kadison, by Abbie Phillips and Directed by Dan Bonnell at the Falcon Theater in Los Angeles, in April 2014. Susan Simpson designed and built the toy theater as well as the shows that were performed inside of it. Included here are concept drawings, the cabinet and the images of the puppet show contained within.

Read Reviews:

LA Times

StageSceneLA

Stage and Cinema