Hot Dog in the Bayou: Stories from the World of Collage

Portland, Oregon collage artist and stand-up comedian Jordan Cerminara returns to Kolaj Fest New Orleans for an evening of storytelling, poetry, performance, comedy, and collage. "Hot Dog in the Bayou: Stories from the World of Collage” builds on the success of last year's “Dinosaurs on the Moon". The evening is part open mic, part evening of comedy. New Orleans chef and collage artist Heidi Hickman will be slinging hot dogs during the event. 

“Blending my love for collage with my onstage persona has helped me find a bigger online audience and a more authentic version of self to share with the world,” wrote Cerminara. From one-liners to carefully crafted bits and full-blown stories, he brings a high-energy style to the stage with clever wordplay, a gamut of goofy voices, and the pipes of a karaoke legend. A featured act at Helium Comedy Club and Laughs Seattle, Cerminara regularly tours throughout North America at clubs and independent venues. To follow up his chart-topping debut comedy album, he is currently developing a new hour of material that will not only incorporate his collage work as on-stage visual aids within the set, but also this second stand-up special will be filmed live at the location of his first ever solo art showing.

A sample of the sound collage made during Seance: Sound Collage with Robbie Morgan will be shared during the event as the soundtrack to a collage of Walter Ruttmann's experimental, silent films from the 1920s. Emerging from the same scene as Dadaist cinéma, Ruttmann's films are formalist and painterly and use geometric shapes, basic lines, and abstraction to create colorful images.

Ric Kasini Kadour will perform a reading of I Took a Trip to the Unknown Language, a poem and collection of fourteen, analogue collages. Made in September 2023 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Sanquhar, Scotland, each collage illustrates a line of a poem that was written in New Orleans, Louisiana. The images and text in I Took a Trip to the Unknown Language tell the story travel through unfamiliar places where the torchbearer of the poem follows a bird through the people and places he encounters. His destination is a familiar one: the understanding of our smallness in the grand expanse of the universe. 

New Orleans poet, proprietor of Cafe Istanbul, and all around cultural force Chuck Perkins will perform a reading from his 2026 book, Beautiful and Ugly Too, "a firsthand account of life in the Crescent City told through poetry and essays." German journalist Jonathan Fischer wrote, “Chuck Perkins’s verses draw from the city’s ancient blues. . . . Like the city’s finest musicians, Perkins is able to capture the survivors’ humor and spirit of resistance with words that hit like uppercuts.”

This event is open to the public. Admission is $10. (Free for those registered for Kolaj Fest New Orleans 2026.)