~Nina Nichols~

The Black Forest Fancies
...is a non-profit organization, puppet troupe, musical laboratory and cabaret collective. Our work explores history and human experience through a lens of fable, waging a whimsically playful and morbidly serious battle for alternative modes of being from the realm of the possessed and dispossessed. The Black Forest Fancies learn from the past. Tales of mistake, misfortune and the misbegotten lifted from history shine light on the folly of the future. Our star crossed narrative valentines explore tales of ecstasy and horror across time: ranging from the murder of an inter-sexed kitchen maid in 16th century Scotland to the undoing of dejected orphans in the American Great Depression. We invoke the collective childhood and spin our depravity into hopefulness. We acknowledge the digital death of the earth and enact rituals for memory. Our marionettes, shadow puppets and sets are manufactured using methods from the archaic to the innovative. Aesthetic reverberations from the computer era are infused with classical stagecraft. Eventually, the Black Forest Fancies will have authored and produced a trilogy of meditations on the complexity of love in darkness: The Black Three. Our current project , "The Black Wallows Foundling Hospital" (written scored and mastered by Matthew Varvil, Pandora Gastelum, Walter McClements and Nina Nichols) will be the second in the series, the first being, "The Tragical Ballad of Black Bonnet".
Using heroic narrative as a springboard, The Black Forest Fancies seek to question notions of beauty and monstrosity, of history and fiction and the tension between personal desire and public belongingness. In an ongoing process of research and observation, we seek out the traces of the rejected and castaway and weave worlds of exaggerated dynamism around them in order to put their trials into conversation with the limitations of society. Our works are fables of errant bodies and subversive emotions. Through spectacle, puppetcraft and song, we fashion faery tales of our personal saints and heroes, the voiceless. The Black Forest Fancies are in the process of organizing national and international educational tours. Summer of 2007, the Fancies travel down the California coast, utilizing bio-diesel and greasel vehicles. Prospects for venues range from schools to rock clubs and art collectives. Our goal is to educate in regards to alternative forms of living, to exemplify a model of sustainable and nomadic community. We mean to explore the history of hope in our environment and the vast possibilities of creativity in our mission to maintain a space for love and dreaming in the world.
As a non-profit, we encourage local artists as an umbrella for grant proposals and work to provide a space for training, performance and collaboration. We wish to form a network of artists from all over the world to mutate, travel and learn from one another in order to explore and honor our past and illuminate our future. Active members of the board are Nina Carolina, Pandora Gastelum, Raven Hinojosa, Courtney Lain, Walter McClements and William "Billy" Scholtz.

"Horse and Buggy
featuring
The Black Forest Fancies
and
Dr. Jingles and Dr. Jangles Wild-Craft Medicine Show
with the Jitter Juice Jollies"

...is the working title for the 2008 project. The basic idea is to teach by example, to simply live, create spectacle, and be noticed. We would like for people to ask the question, "How do they do that?" and have the opportunity to learn how. The horse and buggy system would operate sustainably outside of the strictures of modern living. Food will be donated and harvested, the buggies will be constructed using salvaged trash materials, medicine will be homeopathic/wildcrafted, and performance will be birthed from found materials or little more than dreams.
Moving as slowly as horse and buggies do, there will be more than enough time for guerilla street theater. The Black Forest Fancies are currently working on many ideas ranging from winter wonderland midnight lantern parades to hot air balloon demonstrations and from urban contact dancing to classical commedia dell'arte. Subject matter would circulate around, the death march of winter, the influx of giant insects, the importance of humanity in monoculture, and the existence of remedies, food and propulsion all around us.
Currently, "The Black Forest Fancies" consists of 20-30 active performers. Members of the "Miss Rockaway Armada", "Aurora Aerial" and "The Whirly Bones Cabaret Collective" all join forces as fancies. The Miss Roackaway Armada (missrockaway.com) has spent the past two summers moving down the Mississippi River in home made trash rafts, stopping for performances and parades in every city
along the way. The original cast of "Black Forest Fancies" has spent the past year mostly in southeast asia teaching puppetry and parade arts with "The Dream Community" and the "National Thai Bangkok Theater". Other members of the collective host variety shows in New York, Chicago and the Bay area. Some are circus people with formal training in commedia dell'arte, some are installation artists, some are horse drivers and some are marionette wranglers.
Also, lurking out of the cracks of the darkest woods and the rusted fringes of metropolis comes the Wild-Craft Medicine show to share the fables of a new tomorrow. As civilization struggles for its final breath we shall step to the jitter juice jig and divulge the secrets of our feral ways. Our low-tech show is a vaudevillian mix of theatrics, burlesque, and slapstick humor with full strength jug band music and a healthy dose of the wisdom of yesteryear. Come witness the miracles of our patented cure all tonic certain to strike a fire in your belly, put a swig in your step, and a jug in your hand. Don't forget to bring your wild and fermented food (or other trades) to barter and gift at our goat herd apothecary.
The proposed beginning of this experiment would be July 2008. The finish date can only be determined by the stealthiness of the horses and mules. Our budget would include animal feed, possibly the animals themselves, base supplies for puppets, buggies, costumes, sets, stoves and cooking supplies, lanterns, stipend for unpaid artists involved and animal health support. As many supplies as possible will come from refuse.

TO DONATE:
Feel free to contact us through

nina@sockmonsterforest.com
or our business address,
711 congress St.
New Orleans, LA 70117

to make donations of any sort. We are an active non-profit which would grant all donations tax-exempt status.

The Pomology of Sweetness and Light

Though still in its conceptual phase, the piece is a thematic survey of the co-development of apples and the American identity. Our narrative follows the tale of John Chapman and his alleged child bride as they propagate apple orchards on the American frontier. We were initially inspired by the breeding process of apples. Apples grown from seed alone often yield bitter fruit. If an apple is to come true, one must use a graft. A grafted apple tree will not survive in an alien environment, to yield a sweet fruit in a new world one must create a hybrid between the the grafted tree and a native seed. In developing our narrative we will employ the two primary methods of growing apples, which are from the seed and from the graft of another tree. The seeds with which we are working are the biographies of historical figures such as John Chapman and Saint Lydwina. The graft consists of our juxtaposition of scenes from world mythology and the supposition of other realities intwined in these. Onto the backdrop of the new Eden, we graft the figures of Dionysus, Persephone, Cain and Abel, Leda and the Swan, Camille, and the Big Bad Wolf. We put these fables into conversation to bring about a mutagenesis. We have four primary players. Two aerialists will take the audience through the story of John Chapman and his child bride. The stage is set up with a backdrop and three puppet stages. Two puppeteers work between the realms of stage acting and the world of the marionettes, where the juxtaposed myths and historical citations are enacted. The story is divided into three segments; the legend of John Chapman and his fascination with the young girl, the wedding and travels of Chapman and the child bride and the death of Chapman alongside the enlightenment of the widow. For each segment, there is a vignette for example, "Leda and the Swan" is played on the puppet scale to emphasize the imbalance in their initial romance.

The disciplines involved in "The Pomology of Sweetness and Light" are also governed by mutagenesis. Artistically, we wish to create a piece which is greater than the sum of its parts. Our work is an exercise in selective adaptation. We are not only combining varied narratives but also artistic disciplines. Our disciplines range from aerial dance to shadow puppetry, from classical marionette craft to stage acting, and from digital media projection to soundscape. Through the combination of these disciplines classical and experimental, we wish to broaden the dimension of our storytelling to the full range of its capacity.
We are excited about the potential for an exchange of skills and ideas. The growth of this piece in a foreign environment not only provides us with the inspirational experience of ourselves as other, but also gives aid to the nature of the performance itself, being that we wish to shine light on the fruits of foreign bodies in fertile surroundings.
The work that we do personally, through our troupe, and publicly, through our non-profit, centers on the vision of garnering and disseminating dreams, both cultural and artistic, around the world.

this project includes:
Nina Carolina Nichols (see bio page)
Pandora Andrea Gastelum is a puppeteer, costume designer, writer and performer. She graduated with honors from New York University where she was an awarded essayist and playwright and where she ultimately received a B.F.A. in Theatre, double majoring in the Sociology of Gender. She has studied directing and acting for the stage at La Pietra in Florence and marionette arts under Jan Unger in Prague, Czech Republic. To deepen her understanding of the human condition post graduation, Miss Gastelum spent a year training as an embalmer, studying anatomy and physiology, pathology and comparative religion at the American Academy McAllister Institute of Funeral Service in New York. She has worked as a puppeteer, mask and costume designer, and special affects artist both On and Off Broadway in New York City. She is co-founder/ co-artistic director of the Black Forest Fancies Non-profit Theatre Collective in her native New Orleans, Louisiana. She has written and performed with this troupe for three years, touring through venues across the continental U.S. Pandora was awarded an artist residency for Fall-Winter 2006-07 at Patravadi Theatre in Bangkok Thailand, where she worked closely with actors and acrobats teaching puppet and mask fabrication and studying Thai performance. She is seasonally employed as the wardrobe designer and swing puppeteer on " Seemore's Playhouse," an educational puppet show for television's Public Broadcasting Network based in New York. She is currently enjoying a residency at The Dream Community in Taipei, Taiwan where she is building giant puppets and costumes for the summer parade season and instructing at community workshops on creating art from recycled materials. Pandora has been nominated for a New York Innovative Theatre Award for outstanding costume design on last year's Off- Broadway production of " Dancing v.s.. The Rat Experiment," results to be announced on September 24th, 2007.
Elena Brocade started her performance career in 2001 with her participation in the Tingle-Tangle Menagerie Variety Show in Chicago. While training under Raven Hinojosa in the aerial arts she developed her distinctive theatrical automaton installments which developed into the acclaimed Mechanique Soap-Opera, in demand throughout Chicago today. Beginning under the auspices of the Midnight Circus, Elena became a key performing member of Aloft Aerial Dance and of Aurora Aerial in 2005. Her performances, described as daring, adept and lyrical, have included singles and doubles trapeze, aerial hoop, spanish web, and silks. She has been featured at The Circus Factory, The Aloft Loft, The Church in Minneapolis, Niagara Falls and numerous clubs and venues throughout Chicago, New Orleans, and the nation.
Raven Hinojosa’s training in the aerial arts began at the San Francisco School of Circus Arts in 1997. In 2000 she began to incorporate modern dance into her training and the desire to bring her hobby to the public on a professional level. She produced and performed puppetry and performance art showcases in Chicago from 2000 to 2004, forming the variety troupe 'The Tingle-Tangle Menagerie' where her solo trapeze act was featured in rave revues across the Midwest. She now trains and performs in New Orleans, with recent highlights including the Contemporary Arts Center, The International Hotel, the New Orleans Convention Center, the Beau Rivage Casino, the State Palace Theater, Casino Magic and the Orpheus Marti Gras Ball, among many others. Raven's aerial talents are often recruited for photo shoots and she is featured on the movie length video of ambient superstar Steve Roach. She also regularly performs with the Ann Burr Dance Company in New Orleans and Aloft Aerial Dance Company in Chicago. Today Raven is a member of Fleur de Tease Burlesque and heads Aurora Aerial Productions which tours the gulf coast and beyond featuring doubles and singles acts on trapeze, aerial hoop, and silks. She is also a founding member of the Whirly Bones Variety Collective. What's more, she can hula-hoop with one leg behind her head!