A MAMMAL’S NOTEBOOK: THE ERIK SATIE CABARET recreates the life and work of French modernist composer Erik Satie. Directed by John Bell and featuring pianist Margaret Leng Tan, the production showcases the American premiere of Geneviève de Brabant, Satie’s miniature opera for shadow puppets. The production uses Satie’s drawings and his acerbic, prescient letters and speeches, as well as words others, including John Cage and Jean Cocteau, wrote about him. Great Small Works members perform the variety of avant-garde and everyday characters inhabiting this fin de siecle world. The play is staged with dance (by guest choreographer Clarinda Mac Low), shadow theater, mask performance, film, bunraku, and cabaret acts – a variety spectacle about the meaning of music, art, and theater at the beginning of the last century in a society marked by constant change.
Erik Satie’s music spanned an enormous range: he wrote for Chat Noir Cabaret shadow plays, mystical Rosicrucian theatricals, solo piano, popular song, puppet operas, oratorios, and Dada spectacles. One of Satie’s most well-crafter works of art was his life, as he consciously reinvented himself. A Mammal’s Notebook examines, recreates, and celebrates a crucial period of his life (1893-1914) , when Satie plunged into the social and commercial life of working-class Paris and emerged a confident and determined composer, able to fuse the disparate worlds of the avant-garde and the everday.
John Bell is a foremost expert on popular performance and puppet theater, and he is Professor of Performing Arts at Emerson College in Boston. A protégée of John Cage and a pioneer in the vanguard of American new music, pianist Margaret Leng Tan represents an unbroken trajectory from Erik Satie through Cage to the present. She is well known as a virtuoso of the toy piano as well as for performances that defy the piano’s conventional boundaries. The company also includes GSW members Trudi Cohen, Stephen Kaplin, Jenny Romaine, Roberto Rossi, and Mark Sussman, along with Alessandra Nichols, Aya Kanai, and Isaac Bell. Scene design by Mark Sussman and Alessandra Nichols; lighting design by Mark Sussman; costume design by Alessandra Nichols, Jenny Romaine, Trudi Cohen, and Mildred Cohen; puppet design by Stephen Kaplin; film by Meredith Holch; and dramaturgy by Remi Paillard.
Support for the production comes from the Jim Henson Foundation, the Scherman Foundation, the Kornfeld Foundation, the New York Times Foundation, the MAP Fund of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Florence Gould Foundation, the Emerson College Stearns Distinguished Faculty Award, and the NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.