The Alchemist's Indigestion
March 30, 2014
I brought Michael Sommers to Green Bay because I wanted to share something I loved.
Michael was an artist and puppeteer from Minneapolis — one of the greatest people I know — and I’d been watching what he did with shadow puppetry and paper theatre for years. The Twin Cities had this whole culture of handmade performance that Green Bay had never seen. Tiny stages, cut paper, overhead projectors, live music, an audience of thirty people sitting close enough to hear the paper move. I wanted to bring that here. So I hosted him through the UWGB Art Agency to teach a workshop over a couple of days and then do a public performance at Kavarna coffeehouse.
The workshop was where we learned the mechanics — how to cut the figures, how to use the light, how to think about a screen as a stage. Michael taught us to think in layers: foreground, midground, background, each on a different plane of the projector. Shadows aren’t flat. They have depth if you know how to build it.
For the show, I made a piece called “The Alchemist’s Indigestion.”
The setup was a large devil-like figure, tall, painted on a long scroll that would move vertically on an old-school overhead projector. The audience sees the whole creature first — this towering alchemist-devil with a knowing expression. Then the scroll moves and we go inside him.
The first scene was his stomach. An alchemist — because the devil himself was an alchemist, and I was trying to be clever about the nesting — was brewing something in his oven. Then a transition: a close-up on the opaque projector of a painted cardboard cutout of the alchemist, hinged at the joints with a stick to move his hand. He drinks a potion.
The second scene, further down the scroll, deeper in the body: a bunny hopping across a cavern. Transition to close-up — a painted cardboard bunny who stops, scratches himself, and poops. An animation of the poop. The audience laughed. Then fading back to the macro view, plants grow in the stomach area where the bunny had been, as if something is taking root.
The final scene, at the bottom: little fish with faces swimming around in the lowest chamber. But the audience can see what the fish can’t — a really big fish, hanging at the edge of the frame, waiting. Joel was playing Carmina Fortuna on banjo as the interstitial music, and as it reached its crescendo, the big fish swooped in and ate all the little fish. The audience gasped and then laughed. To close, we scrolled back up to the devil-alchemist’s face, his eyes rolling back in his head, as if the whole cycle was about to start again.
That was it. Five minutes, maybe. Paper and light and a banjo and a coffeehouse full of people who had never seen anything like this. And they loved it. Not politely — genuinely. Like something had been unlocked for them. They didn’t know you could do this with an overhead projector and some cardboard.
It was the best time I’d had in a very long time. Certainly the best time that semester. Michael and his partner, Sue Haas, came all the way from Minneapolis and I just wished my kids could have seen it. The whole night was magical — not in the way people use that word casually, but in the way that means: something appeared that wasn’t there before, and everyone in the room felt it happen.
This is the thing I want to do more of. This is the throughline. Not murals, not websites, not day jobs — this. Live, handmade, in a room with people, the audience close enough to hear the paper move. I didn’t know it then as clearly as I know it now. But that night at Kavarna was proof of concept for everything I’ve been circling back to for twenty years.