January 25 & 26, 2008 8:00 PM
Hunter Center
$10
Member tickets are not available via the internet.

Starring Jo Harvey Allen.

Come early! Galleries open until 7 PM on Saturday night before the performance with special reduced admission.

The outlaw country singer, painter, writer, and conceptual artist Terry Allen offers a work-in-progress showing of his new multimedia theater piece. The narrative arc encompasses the 17 days tormented French playwright and actor Antonin Artaud spent chained to a metal cot in the bowels of a ship as he was being deported from Ireland back to France. This theatrical work with live original music imagines what might have happened in Artaud's mind during his grueling voyage.

"Allen is utterly uncomprising, profoundly unsettling even at his most cheerful,, and one of the most important musical voices around." -- Boston Globe

Press release >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Terry Allen’s Multimedia Performance Ghost Ship Rodez to be Shown as Work-in-Progress

(North Adams, Massachusetts) Terry Allen knows how to tell a story. In fact, telling stories has been the inspiration behind Allen’s award-winning songs, theatrical writings, and visual art for more than forty years. At MASS MoCA Allen will continue work on Ghost Ship Rodez, a project he began in France in 2006. The multimedia performance presents his fictional story of a horrific voyage between Ireland and Dublin taken by the French theater visionary Antonin Artaud in 1937. Allen and his wife, Jo Harvey Allen, for now the single performer in the piece, will be in residency at MASS MoCA for three weeks concluding with two work-in-progress showings of Ghost Ship Rodez on Friday, January 25, and Saturday, January 26, at 8 PM in the Hunter Center.

Terry Allen believes that the inner life of any artist of value has the traits of three essential characters: “Children (they are innocent), Criminals (they break rules), and the Insane (they inhabit another world).” For Allen, Antonin Artaud lived this construct precisely. “[Artaud] consistently tries to go beyond everything… body, language, sex, society, disease, God, and art itself…whether in word, image, object or performance.” Artaud’s childhood was riddled with disease and depression which led to spending much of his young life in a sanatorium. Prescribed an opiate by the director of the sanatorium during one of his stays, Artaud experienced lifelong addiction to opiates of all kinds. Although he spent much of his childhood in bed, Artaud took the opportunity to study and cultivate an appreciation for art and culture. Inspired by Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Poe, Artaud became a poet and artist, and would eventually become a theatrical visionary credited for introducing the “Theater of Cruelty” in which patrons of the theater were pushed beyond their comfort levels to experience art in a new way. An intellectual in various areas of study including psychiatry and psychology, Artaud once wrote, “There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.”

On a voyage to Ireland Artaud obtained a walking stick that he convinced himself was the true staff of St. Patrick. He traveled to Ireland in 1937 to return the staff to its country of origin but while there experienced a series of extreme mental and emotional crises, resulting in his deportation to France, where he eventually died of cancer in 1948. Ghost Ship Rodez examines the intense 17 days Artaud spent strait-jacketed and chained to a metal cot in the bowels of a ship after his deportation. Allen’s theatrical piece imagines what might have happened in Artaud’s mind while he was restrained during this grueling voyage, and later when he spent the rest of his life in various mental institutions where he received more than fifty electroshock treatments. In Allen’s words: “I don’t think any artist has ever taken the terrible desperations of their life and created a body of work as profoundly productive from that turmoil. I would hope, in the end, this piece at the very least shows this aspect of Artaud’s gifts to the world.”

Artaud regarded all of the important women in his life as his "Daughters of the Heart to be Born". Acclaimed actress, writer and performance artist Jo Harvey Allen plays 'Daughter of the Heart', a clairvoyant chameleon and multi-narrator, whose shifting personas bring alive the stories from the Ghost Ship.

Ghost Ship Rodez follows Dugout, a fictional history about Allen’s parents’ lives, which encompassed a staged theatrical production, exhibitions of sculptures and drawings, and a radio adaptation of text and songs in three different venues in Los Angeles in 2000-2002. At MASS MoCA Allen will take time to rework and rewrite parts of the script, finishing his stay with a work-in-progress “staged reading” including certain set elements such as sails that will act as projection screens showing original footage shot by the artist, as well as footage of Artaud’s film appearances. Eventually Allen aspires to include original songs, visual art pieces, projections, and a full set featuring the ship Artaud was held hostage in as part of the ultimate production of Ghost Ship Rodez. “A sense of moving through time and eventuality are strongholds of Allen's artistic vision. This vision is big, but it isn't just the art. Allen carries a bigness with him. He is himself; he is simply Terry Allen. The great Terry Allen” says Glasstire, Texas Visual Art Review of Dugout.

Tickets for Ghost Ship Rodez are $10. MASS MoCA members receive a 10% discount. Tickets are available through the MASS MoCA Box Office located off Marshall Street in North Adams, open from 11 A.M. until 5 P.M., closed Tuesdays. Tickets can also be charged by phone by calling 413.662.2111 during Box Office hours or purchased on line at www.massmoca.org.

MASS MoCA, the largest center for contemporary visual and performing arts in the United States, is located off Marshall Street in North Adams on a 13-acre campus of renovated 19th-century factory buildings.