The Residents´ Freak Show Live / Obludárium
(programme from the performance)
The Residents - Official Biography
The Residents´ Freak Show
The Resident's Freak Show Live (Rock & Pop, 21. 12. 1995)

Photos from the performance
Posters from the performance
The other performances of The Residents in the Archa Theatre





The Residents´ Freak Show Live / Obludárium

World Premiere November 1, 1995 at the Archa Theatre

Director: The Residents
Musical composer: The Residents
Script: The Residents
Scenic Designer, Costume Designer, Puppet Designer: Ronald M. Davis
Musical Director: Miroslav Wanek
Lighting Design: Chris McGregor
Sound Design: Tony Janssen
Vocal Director: Laurie Amat
Stage Manager: Richard Němec
Assistant Director: Jana Svobodová
Production Manager: Kateřina Kohut

This performance is made possible with the generous assistance of Homer Flynn and Hardy Fox from The Cryptic Corporation.

Cast:

Actors
Tex: Wayne Doba
Wanda: Andrea Nováková
Herman: Vladimír Gut
Benny: Miroslav Matyáš

Singers
Laurie Amat
Andrea Jurčová
Iva Nachtmannová

Musicians
Conductor: Miroslav Wanek
Keyboard: František Svačina
Bass: Kamil Krůta
Cello: Lenka Kavalová
Tenor saxophone: Jindřich Dolanský
Guitar: Romek Hanzlík
Drums: Hynek Schneider
Keyboard: Vladimír Helebrant

Special Thanks to:
Guido Randzio
Karin Wittich (EuroRalph)
Leigh Barbier

The Residents´ Freak Show Live is made possible by the support of the Trust of Mutual Understanding through the assistance of Parallel, the program of the Intersection for the Arts and Československá obchodní banka, a. s.

Thanks to our sponsors: Československá obchodní banka, a.s., Rencar Praha a.s., Active Travel, FAN, Rock & Pop, Radio 1, Mediaport, KLM, CUE, department store Kotva.




In the Spring of 1993, I was walking down San Francisco's Folsom Street. I entered two big rooms that were filled with bizarre props, musical instruments and computers. Was it an art atelier? Was it a music studio or computer office? Even today, I still don't know. But I was sure that I was standing in the middle of things that I knew very well. The props were from the periods of the Third Reich´n´roll to the cubistic masks of Cube-E, lying in a pile exactly as they came from the exhibition at the Kitchen in New York. On the computer screen, the first version of the interactive Freak Show CD DOM was flashing. I believed that I was in the studio of The Residents. Two month later, The Residents appeared secretly in Prague. Our theatre was nothing more than one big hollow space. We studied all the plans carefully, … and believed that we would build the theatre. It was at that time the idea of these performances in the Archa was born.
          Two years of careful preparation; discussions about themes, writing the script, new music and its instrumentation, selecting collaborators, set design, and rehearsals for the performance - it all represented a difficult operation that required and employed post offices, telephone lines, flight connections - spinning here and there actors half the globe. And today, this effort brings its own fruits.
          The Residents prepared their Freak Show for Prague, the stage, grotesque pictures of declining show business. They were inspired by the American tradition of showing anomalies of human evolution in circuses, people to whom Nature didn't wish to appear as the general norm dictates. Kindness and pleasure are not qualities owned by The Residents. Highly stylised, crude imagination, relationships oscillating between love and hate - these are characteristic trademarks of their activities.
          Maybe it is the non-conformity of The Residents and their sense for rough humour that makes them so popular in the Czech Republic. A long time ago, Prague chose The Residents, and they have chosen Prague.
          The fabulous foursome did not enter onto unknown ground. Even here, the members keep their principal of conspiring strong. Our lawyer asked us: "What guarantee do you have that it is really them?" The answer is very simple. Anything like this couldn't be made by anyone else except The Residents.

Ondřej Hrab





The Residents - Official Biography

It's been said that the one thing we never
forget about a person is their gender:
The Residents are genderless.
The next most memorable feature is the face,
The Residents are faceless.
The third thing we remember is their personality.
The Residents have no personalities.

At a time when no one exists without selling and nothing sells like personality, why would anyone deliberately enter the marketplace of capitalist culture with such a disadvantage? For over twenty years, these faceless anti-stars have existed in the dim outskirts of America's awareness and, during that entire time, they've consciously kept their origins and personal lives shrouded in mystery. The creation of this obviously contrived "mystery" was one of the first decisions they reached after realising that they had become a "group" - something they define as an organism with a mind, will and direction of it's own. The essence of this decision was to aggressively create a separation between their personal and professional lives. Anonymity was, and is, their only rule. They live by it to this day.
          The purpose, then, of this biography is obviously not to tell you that one of The Residents is a former protestant minister or that one is the father of Siamese twins or even that another owns one of the world's largest collections of model railroading equipment. This is the type of personal information that they long ago declared irrelevant to their work. The purpose here is to inform the uniformed with a few facts from a historical point view.
          The Residents' career allegedly began around 1970 in San Mateo, California. Music and sound were their earliest interests but, since they were not musicians, the tape recorder became their tool of choice. Now considered pioneers in the use of the "home studio", The Residents bought the first four track, eight track, sixteen track and digital recorders available on the consumer market. They experimented with many different musical ideas before sending out their first real product as a Christmas cards in 1972; it was the now legendary Santa Dog, a two record set of 45rpm discs. Since that time they have released over twenty album length discs as well as many singles and EP's , each resounding with their hallmark style of outlandish experimentation.
          While the pursuit of ideas through music and sound was proving fruitful, The Residents were still not satisfied. The optimal end of their vision remained unseen. In 1976 this attitude and a pile of old newspapers yielded an amazing result - a new art form called The Music Video. A few years later in 1982, The Museum of Modern Art in New York recognised the Residents as one of the inventors of this form and included that first video, The Third Reich N´ Roll, and another, The Residents' One Minute Movies, in their permanent collection.
          But the restless creativity of The Residents was still on the move. While their first ten years were wildly fertile, they were beginning to feel confined by the introverted existence of life in the studio. Real time performance in front of a live audience seemed like a worthy challenge, so they took their ideas on stage. As performance art pre-dating the definition, the shows of The Residents, like their music and videos, were not like anything else. While touring in Japan, Europe, Australia and America, they completed over 200 performances with three different production from 1982 to 1990.
          In 1992, with Twenty Years of musical releases, videos, live performances, TV scores (for MTV and Pee Wee Herman) and several books out in the world, The Residents decided that it was time for a little reflection. In June of that year, the prestigious The Voyager Company released an interactive laser disc that accurately compiled the milestones of their long career and, in October, The Museum of Modern Art held a film and video retrospective while also co-sponsoring an installation of The Residents' performance and video artefacts at The Kitchen in New York. The Residents themselves added to the celebration by creating a shiny new album from mouldy old ideas - lovingly referred to as, Our finest Flowers.
          And has that restless energy finally begun to run out? Wasn't twenty years of artistic indulgence, all in the name of anti-fame, more than enough? Apparently not for The Residents. Their first interactive CD-ROM, The Residents' Freak Show was released by The Voyager Company early in 1994. Based on their Freak Show compact disc (1990) and graphic novel (1992) releases, this collaboration with award winning animator/designer, Jim Ludtke, has become the critically acclaimed vehicle that has lifted The Residents into the uncharted territory of yet another new art form. Cementing the substance on their interest in interactive art, The Residents also released The Gingerbread Man in 1994. This disc, released by BMG Interactive and the new multimedia label ION, was totally unique at the time of its release, since it contained an entire album in both multimedia and audio-only formats.
          With no signs of slowing down, The Residents ended 1995 with a feverish burst of creative. Once again collaborating with Jim Ludtke, they completed Bad Day on The Midway, the highly anticipated follow-up to their Freak Show CD-ROM. Released on Halloween, October 31, Bad Day was published by the multimedia label, Inscape, and distributed by Warner Interactive Entertainment. On the following day, November 1, The Residents reaffirmed this latest surge of productivity with the premiere of their latest performance work, a fully staged theatrical production of Freak Show, at the Archa Theatre in Prague. Remaining offstage for the first time, The Residents demonstrated their continuing growth and interest in theatre by writing, directing and scoring Freak Show Live! in collaboration with the Archa Theatre and a cast, crew, and musicians from the Czech Republic.
          With their creative energy intact and the future more open than ever, The Residents are still looking ahead to new challenges. Perhaps in a culture so saturated with hype and lacking in a substance, anti-fame has become it's own reward.





The Residents´ Freak Show

The Residents´ Freak Show takes place in a small run down carnival side show somewhere on the outskirts of nowhere. This particular nowhere has a distinctly American flavour and, while the period is indefinite, the events probably occur within the Twentieth Century, but not too near the end.

Characters from The Freak Show

Tex - The barker or announcer of the Freak Show. Tex is a cynical and arrogant former lion tamer who wants to see himself above the sideshow trash he works with. While he tells everyone that it is only a matter of time before he makes his comeback, in reality he's a bitter washed up alcoholic. His only redeeming quality is an obsessive romantic interest in the Freak Show geek, Wanda the Worm Woman. While Tex is in denial of his romantic interest in Wanda, he is both compulsively drawn to her and repulsed by this compulsion.

Wanda, the worm woman - In freak show terminology, a geek is someone who does disgusting things in front of a paying audience. Wanda, who sucks worms for a living, fits this description perfectly. She is an overweight former nun, who somehow manages to appear serenely sublime with worms dangling from her large voluptuous lips. She also cries when she is alone late at night.

Herman, the human mole - Painfully shy, Herman is a recluse who never leaves his dirt-filled trailer. By billing himself as a human mole and allowing the Freak Show customers to peek into his windows for a small fee, Herman has transformed the liability of his self conscious behaviour into a financial asset. Herman also has secrets, the most notable of which is that skin condition known as albinism, a condition that is easily concealed beneath a layer of dirt.

Benny The Bump - Stupid, overweight and unattractive, Benny would have a difficult time supporting himself were it not for his willingness to display his only remarkable feature, a large shapeless bump that projects outward from the center of his chest. Other than fond recollections of his mother, Benny´s only interest in life is a collection of women's wrestling magazines, and he often fantasises about the happiness that a close friendship with a female wrestler might bring.

Harry The Head - Harry, a true freak of nature who existed for several years as a living disembodied head, is now dead. A miserable wretch in life, the human head's career is still flourishing and the admiration of his co-workers has never been higher, so one would have to say that death has been good to Harry. In respect to his last wishes, the head can still be seen performing in the Freak Show - preserved in a bottle of formaldehyde. (Harry is played by a puppet.)

Jelly Jack, the boneless boy - Another amazing human oddity, Jelly Jack is exactly what he seems, an adolescent youth born without bones. He lives inside a glass case in Tex's trailer and is brought out only for his startling but brief appearances on stage. Jelly lives a life of sensory deprived isolation and longs for human contact, freedom and sex. (Jelly Jack is also played by a puppet.)





The Resident's Freak Show Live

If you are waiting for Rock & Pop to finally reveal who The Residents really are, don't hold your breath. Even so, three cylindrical eyeballs and one death mask come on stage to take a bow to their first audience during a huge applause. Whether or not it truly was them, I wouldn't stick my hand in a fire (on the contrary). But does it really matter?
          In all of the interviews with the "official spokesmen" of the mysterious group, it was stated that The Freak Show will not be a concert of the Residents, not in any way their way of performance, but it will be theatre - a theatre piece, a musical, or if you want to say a "rock opera" (as their Californian secretary has said it has been prepared by them, but that they will not play a personal role in the performance). And the expectation of production was practically fulfilled down to the last point. Why "practically"? I think that theatre was not the intention, but was rather some play on it - like saying "a play about a play about the Freak Show". In the first row, one can see clearly the detailed elements of the performance... I think The Residents merely wanted to show a very strong and very human theme in The Freak Show, thus creating an opportunity for discussion, even though they used somewhat different working processes than we are used to in the theatre.
          The music, the second substantial part of The Freak Show, was alive and real in contrast to what was happening on stage. Miroslav Wanek, providing the musical arrangement and conducting the group, Už jsme Doma - the "circus orchestra", succeeded in striking a new sound that somehow went off in a different direction with their own recordings of the Residents' music. (I don't want to say it in so far as I believe it).The flawless performing achievements of the musicians are self-evident, but this time they add a new, truly deep "plunge" to the entire piece - they did not try to impress the audience member with the music so much that he would not be able to get the music out of his head. Certainly, even here, it is necessary to remind one that even the musical compositions of the performance were created, down to the very small details, under the careful watch of the Residents who as authors have the right to discuss all details of their music. We are now speaking in the first row about the perfect professionalism of these Czech rockers.
          To attend The Freak Show is definitely one of the better theatre activities that one should do during these cold, damp November evenings. Then, you will not miss out on one of the most interesting cultural events of this year. But you better hurry - after Prague, the rest of Europe, and perhaps the World, is waiting for them.

Ondřej Bezr, Rock & Pop, 21. 12. 1995