About

Talespin

In the fall of 1986, Iris Rose and James Siena decided to create a two-person performance.
They had been performing together frequently since June as half of the Stereotype in Quad
quartet, but they hadn’t created a duet for just the two of them since prior to their wedding
the year before.

James proposed that he and Iris compose a fantasy adventure story, trading off writing, with
each picking up where the other left off as in the party games Rigmarole and Exquisite
Corpse. The story would include multiple levels of recursion – things that repeat in a
self-reflective way, like a pair of mirrors that face each other – a mathematical concept
explored in Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel Escher Bach, which James had recently read.

In the resulting tale, Dusty (Iris) and Scout (James) encountered alternative versions of
themselves several times: they saw their apartment building onstage at an amphitheater,
with themselves coming out the front door; Dusty was hit on the head by a book called Hide
and Seek with Dusty and Scout that was able to describe exactly what was happening at the
time and addressed her directly; and they saw a movie called The Trouble with Dusty from
which they learned the cure for being a horned purple monster (a problem they happened
to be dealing with at the time). In some cases, these different realities intersected – Dusty
found out how to save herself and Scout from an explosion by reading the end of the Hide
and Seek book – but in others, they were independent.

Besides these multiple levels of reality, Talespin contained many other fantastic elements,
such as our heroes turning into monsters from smoking a cigarette they found outside their
front door and later stepping inside the full moon, where they watched The Trouble with Dusty
projected on the inside of the moon’s surface.

None of these magical elements were shown literally on the stage, however. Everything was
suggested through movement, and the two performers never spoke during the show. The
story was narrated on tape by visual artist Marlene McCarty, who was their downstairs
neighbor and had a wonderful storyteller voice that bore traces of her childhood in Kentucky
and her design school years in Basel, Switzerland. The inspiration for Talespin‘s broad
physical style came from, among other things, slapstick comedy, cartoons, and children’s
book illustrations (which were directly imitated on stage – with difficulty in some cases since
they were fantasy creations that only existed on paper). illustration example

Talespin was first performed in December 1986 at St. Marks Church as part of the Poetry
Project on a double feature with Kim X Knowlton and Maggie Siena’s Twins. Later that month
it was presented at Kestutis Nakas’ Gates of Dawn, a weekly performance series in a Knights
of Columbus hall under Our Lady of Vilnius, a church near the Holland Tunnel entrance at
Canal Street.

The following summer Iris was asked by Marianne Weems of Creative Time to perform her
20-minute one-woman opera, Camden, as part of their Performance in the Park series at the
bandshell in Central Park. However, after Ms. Weems listened to the Camden audiotape Iris
gave her, she was concerned about its use of profanity and whether it was an appropriate fit
for the diverse public audience at a free outdoor concert. Iris proposed doing Talespin
instead, since it was appropriate for all ages, was broadly physical, and the only voice, the
narrator’s, was amplified. Creative Time mailer And that is how the show in which Dusty and
Scout saw themselves performing on stage at an amphitheater was actually performed on
stage at an amphitheater, though as far as we know, no one turned into a monster.