Bowlahoola: a performance in a conditional mood

Lift up your anchors and plunge into Bowlahoola: a performance in a conditional mood!

Bowlahoola unfolds as a sequence of five monologues in the conditional tense. What could happen, what might have happened, what we wish would happen: these hypotheticals emerge from and chafe against the harrowing conditions we’re living in.

Travestying the legal tool of the hypo, crisscrossing five centuries and five continents, taking up questions of abortion, privacy, white feminism, preemptive warfare, climate catastrophe, and the carceral state, Bowlahoola weaves and tangles what ifs until it becomes impossible to anchor any speaker in a particular identity. Instead, the monologues—performed by longtime collaborators Kate Kremer and Bryce Payne—become portraits of the ways we privilege hypothetical over actual lives, and the real devastations that result.

This version of Bowlahoola, specially created for The Flow Chart Foundation, will run about an hour.

Bowlahoola is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Kate Kremer is a playwright and publisher. Frequently using archives as sites for addressing the ways that our ethics, feelings, and intimacies are conditioned by the systems that we live and love within, her work has been described by Mac Wellman as “way ahead of the curve.” Kate’s plays have been produced at JACK in Brooklyn, the Figge Art Museum, the Public Theater (Weasel Festival), Dixon Place, SFX Fest, the Motor Company, the Wild Project, Brooklyn College, and Stagefemmes. Charlatans was selected for the Bushwick Starr Reading Series and was a finalist for the Princess Grace Award. She’s been a finalist for the Dennis and Victoria Ross Foundation Award, shortlisted for the Tom LaFarge Award and the Leslie Scalapino Award, and received an honorable mention for the Leah Ryan Fund for Emerging Women Writers. An excerpt from Kate’s long-form solo performance The Intimacy—which premiered at the Flow Chart Foundation last year—is forthcoming in Fence, Issue 42. Kate is the editor of the experimental play publishing organization 53rd State Press and currently teaches playwriting at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise.

Bryce Payne has spent the majority of хуг adult life making performing/performance art in New York City. Xyr work has been formed by a lifetime of connections made on stages, sidewalks, dancefloors, web applications, and subway cars. Xe hopes to maintain xyr humanity in a web of structures designed to exhaust or pervert xem; xe hopes to encourage your efforts to do the same. Insta: @the.nice.bryce

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ABOUT THE FLOW CHART FOUNDATION

Toward opening new possibilities for discovery, thought, and connection, The Flow Chart Foundation explores poetry and the interrelationships of various art forms as guided by the legacy of poet John Ashbery and promotes engagement with his work.

Flow Chart Foundation programs and resources inspire creative thinking, exploration, and transformation.

The Flow Chart Foundation, Inc. is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization raising funds to support its programs with contributions tax-deductible to the full extent provided by law.