ABOUT

All Mortal Beasts & Deities’ performances embody dance, theater, circus, and clowning. However, the origins of the troupe were in the discipline of sculpture. As an art teacher back in the mid 90s I presented a sculpture project to an eighth grade class which involved creating spirit animal heads out of papier mache. The students enjoyed the project, but I got carried away making that first exemplar: my lion. I sewed up a body to go with the lion head and took it to a large Halloween gathering, beginning to develop the lion character, and discovered the magic of the mask. I was smitten! My puppet character was a living, moving sculpture. He earned the capital "L" Lion. Not long after creating Lion, I felt he needed a contrasting foil. I made a lamb mask, complete with lamb body of course. This allowed me to take friends along with me to play. Lion and Lamb did several small improvisational appearances at parties, festivals and local fairs. Now they mostly spend their days biblically laying about, but almost 30 years later they will go out dancing once in a while, like the old times. I made several other puppet characters back then too, primarily out of papier mache. Loving contrasts as I do, I made a foil for each, then worked out their characters and how they might interact. These puppets included Bacchus, Satyr and Nymph Phoebe. Then Old Man and Old Woman Oracle with their missives. And Jackson Pollack and Lee Krasner had fun splashing paint! It was about this time that Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art asked me to create Lono and Laka, a Polynesian creation God and his Goddess, for a Tiki-themed gala event. These characters inspired the Mortal Beasts and Deities’ troupe name. Fast forward, and I was asked to create a hawk for a local music festival. I felt a hawk puppet should fly above the audience as a real hawk might. Having seen some of the performers at Bread and Puppet on stilts, I figured it couldn’t be too hard... but of course building a hawk took a lot longer than anticipated, so two days before the debut I was sewing the last feathers on, yet I still hadn’t tried getting up on the stilts! Freaking out, I taught myself in one day, utilizing the classic ‘trial and crash’ method. I eventually got it all sorted out. Just in time, too. The Hawk debut did go off without any crashes, albeit without much grace, either. So wonderful to be young, and so fortunate those lessons weren’t as hard as they could have been! Right after Hawk’s frightening debut, a couple of friends noticed me out in the neighborhood with Hawk on stilts, practicing and practicing. I guess Hawk was hard to miss. They came over exclaiming, “World class stuff, Mark!” One of them happened to have connections at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, so she introduced me to the priest in charge of coordinating arts events there. This introduction turned into a commission to create and perform a flock of doves for their Pentecost service. Andy Warhol said, “It’s all in who you know.” He was right of course, but I’ll add… never underestimate the power of luck and synchronicity. For the Cathedral project I had to build three giant doves. The dove design was similar to Hawk but more involved, so I held feather cutting parties, and olive branch building teas. Unfortunately, a fire and other mishigas at the Cathedral caused them to cancel the commission. Gratefully, the Salisbury Congregational Church took it over, and the soaring of the Flock of Doves at Pentecost was debuted, with original music, in May of 2004 in Salisbury Connecticut. The Doves have been the signature act of the Mortal Beasts & Deities ever since. The Flock of Doves commission required others to learn to walk on stilts, too. Teaching the others also improved my own stilting, which became more graceful. Some of those new stilters came with dance training which they adapted to stilts. One was an accomplished ballet dancer, so we all learned stilt versions of pirouettes and arabesques. Another had swing dance experience, another tango.... and eventually we were stilt dancers rather than stilt walkers! Since then I’ve trained a few hundred people to walk on stilts. Just about all of them were successful and enjoyed scratching off 'stilt walking' from their bucket list. However, I continue to be especially grateful for those few who came back for more, became stilt dancers with us, performed regularly and joined the growing troupe roster. It wasn't long before we realized that dancing to music on stilts without the giant puppets was also really fun. It is similar to how one might dance on roller skates at the rink, so I then began to develop stilt dance costumes and stilt dance shows. These days most of our shows feature stilt dancers without puppets, while our roots are with the moving sculptures, the puppets. I still love every opportunity that comes along to make new puppets, and to bring out the loyal old characters too.