The Royal Frog Ballet presents THE SURREALIST NAP-ARET
This September, we’re taking a nap, and we think you should, too. Due to the continued presence of the coronavirus, The Royal Frog Ballet’s 2021 performance offering was THE SURREALIST NAP-ARET, a sonic lullaby experience, to be relished from the comfort of your own couch. The collective has offered LICHEN the chance to nap together and present this sonic lullaby in the meadow. Please bring blankets, pillows, and whatever else might keep you warm and cozy.
This event is free, though donations are appreciated and will be sent to The Royal Frog Ballet in gratitude of their creation. Please note that The Royal Frog Ballet will be with us in spirit, not in person.
”Our hope with this ‘show’? To collectively consider what it means to rest and what it requires to be able to dream. To actually rest, in fact, to put you to sleep! And then perform the Cabaret in your dreams. Yes, there will be songs! Stories! Soundscapes! Slapstick! Surrealism! But this time, also, sleep! Sound weird but restful? It will be! Thanks for your continued support of this project and the new places we go together.” - The Royal Frog Ballet
When: Sunday, September 11, 2022, 3-5pm
Where: LICHEN CENTER
Please RSVP so we know how many people to expect.
Parking: We have space for ten cars at LICHEN. Please carpool and reserve a parking spot below.
Accessibility: The meadow is relatively level with a few divots and tufts of long grass. There is an outhouse with a ramp nearby. Seating on offer are wooden benches and a few chairs. If you have any accessibility needs, please don’t hesitate to let us know. To honor neurodiversity and the porcupines in the meadow, please don’t bring pups. ♡ Further notes can be found on the Accessibility page.
About The Royal Frog Ballet
The Royal Frog Ballet is an amoeba of collaborators, a producing body, a shouting household of households, and an aspiring dance team in search of parade.
We create performance and installation art for community gatherings in outdoor landscapes, promoting aliveness through creativity, community, and curiosity. We are committed to making magic, speaking out, and listening.
Since 2007 we have convened annually to create large-scale works of performance and sculptural installation for The Surrealist Cabaret. Our ever-shifting group of collaborators travel from far and wide to the place where this work and our personal connections first began in what is now known as Easthampton and Amherst, MA, on Nipmuc and Pocumtuc land. The physical landscape and our multi-layered collaborations fuel a special blend of conceptual, cheeky, ritualistic, folk art, that we occasionally tour and exhibit in other places as well.
Together we create space for communities to gather, celebrate, commemorate, speculate, pause and leap.
Our work is imaginative, collaborative, generative, investigative. We believe the practices within our collaboration and community gathering are directly related to the needs for restructuring our shared realities. We believe that health and survival is collaborative—that the health and survival of our community and of ourselves as individuals is intertwined with that of all people and communities whose race, class, gender, sexuality, culture, abilities and age are too often cultural barriers to health and survival.
We do not accept that a world that includes such racism, sexism, classism, trans/homophobia, war, violence, destruction, greed, and oppression, as ours does, is our best. We do not accept that our planet needs to be ravaged in order to live. As a collective, we endeavor through our work to continually ask each other and our larger community what it means to be a part of this world. We use questions to frame our process of collective exploration starting with:
How do we make a different possibility possible in this world?
Photo by Seth Butler
The Surrealist Cabaret is a buffet of dream sensescrystallizing in the form of an outdoor performance each fall.
With the wind full of the breath of apples, wood-smoke, the smell of fields turned under for the winter rye, violins bellow along with the cows, sequined show tunes follow dirty and divine offerings to the dead, poets mutter to the stones as sculptures and flags unfurl from the undergrowth. This is an evening not to be missed.
The Surrealist Cabaret is a performance installation that draws on images familiar and ethereal, haunting and campy. This performance takes audience members traveling through a farm landscape at autumnal sunset. Along the way they encounter a surreal collection of short performances, installation pieces, and roving characters created by artists working collaboratively in various media, exploring and celebrating themes of season and place. Magical, luminescent, and a dash of spooky.
What started as an open studio for performance artists to show works-in-progress, the Surrealist Cabaret has turned into a wild celebration of season, landscape, death and regrowth, spirits, stories and community. Each artist takes the theme for the year and runs with it, often in all directions.
The evening will delight and befuddle you with its volley of dancing skeletons, puppet shows, flocking birds, poetry, lanterns, sculptures, parades, saints, dancers, stilters, musicians, and more!
It is dirty, it is holy, it is down home, it is…well, surreal.
