The Carpetbag Brigade, a kinetic hybrid between the worlds of theater, dance, and circus, is directed by Jay Ruby. A touring ensemble with an increasing international presence, the company is best known for its breathtaking acrobatic stilt spectacles. Founded in Prescott, Arizona, in 1998, Carpetbag Brigade relocated to the San Francisco Bay area in 2004.

23 Jan 2010

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Press Release

You Don't Know Jack

The Carpetbag Brigade

Conceptually Directed by Jay Ruby Devised and Choreographed by the Ensemble and Editorially Directed by Varrick Grimes

"...AN AMAZING AMALGAM OF PHYSICAL THEATER, ORIGINAL MUSIC, AND TRADITIONAL STORYTELLING TECHNIQUES… Allan Amundsden Eureka Times Standard, California

THE SHOW

A twisted physical comedy with live instrumentation and athletic physicality: a wickedly inventive tale of surreal worlds and real nightmares…

The Carpetbag Brigade adds a Jungian twist with a dash of PTSD to Jack and the Beanstalk. You Don’t Know Jack is the surreal tragic comedy of an alcoholic dead man and the shadow of his wild dysfunctional family. Inspired by Robert Bly’s The Sibling Society, this funny, nightmarish fairy tale excavates the echo of trauma created by the casual and constant contact soldiers have with war. Young Jack grows up in a world overshadowed by the ghosts of his grandfather’s death from alcohol and war-induced Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Trying to make sense of a mother who sings disturbing lullabies, teachers who eat children and a puzzling world of contradictory voices and dreams emerging from the grave, Jack plunges into a parallel inner world. Here, amidst a crew of grotesque characters shipwrecked between myth and reality, for whom life is a struggle not to become monsters, Jack penetrates the upside-down fairy–tale world enveloping him.

With original and traditional music played live onstage by the performers, and a rich tapestry of objects and poetry, YOU DON’T KNOW JACK is a theatrical response to the moral and emotional wars that soldiers return home with. It invites us to dig in the dirt of our own imaginations and plant new seeds, stories and songs.

“The immensely talented cast of five are such strong performers that they imbue their dark, deliciously odd tale of a dead alcoholic and his messed-up family with a hypnotic intensity; it's impossible not to enter their dysfunctional, fragmented worlds”
Tina Jackson, The Metro, Glasgow, Scotland

THE PROCESS

In 2007 “You don’t know Jack” began at an intensive retreat at El Puente Theater in rural New Mexico. Our intent was to explore the dark side of family dynamics. The first improvisation was to go out separately in the village of Penasco and find objects that spoke to us. Everyone returned with empty whisky bottles...

The cast created actions, songs, texts and dances individually. The story of Jack and the Beanstalk wound itself onto the framework of our creative material with the assistance of inspiration from The Sibling Society by Robert Bly. The story crawled like a vine through our creative process and became the scaffold upon which we organized our actions and interactions. The characters of Jack began to emerge and live their present day story set amongst a domestic milieu of postwar trauma, alcoholism and emotional disturbance.

Self-devised theater work requires a vigilant attention to detail and a dedication to searching out the nuances of a discovered story. It is rare for a theater company to return to a performance and continue to work on its details over three years. Commitment to that kind of aesthetic maturation runs counter to the dynamics of consumer culture capitalism. The process creating “You don’t know Jack” is also rare in that it has had two directors. Jay Ruby was the conceptual director of the performance and birthed it while performing in it as an actor. Editing Director, Varrick Grimes of Toronto, Canada, offered to guide the piece into adulthood after seeing it in the summer of 2008. The two had worked together before in carpetbag productions and shared a similar vocabulary and theatrical ethics inherited from Grimes’ work with Canada’s Primus and Number 11 theater and Ruby’s studies with Denmark’s Odin Teatret.

The company’s fourth intensive retreat in February 2010 will see the culmination of an elaborate and vigorous artistic process.

“The Carpetbag Brigade of San Francisco are a company not to be ignored; and they're presenting this most extreme and mind-blowing of all the shows on this year's Fringe about the damaging impact of war.” Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman, Edinburgh, Scotland

THE TOUR

The Carpetbag Brigade will be touring You don’t know Jack through California and Arizona in the Winter and Spring of 2010. Known for touring their acrobatic stilt productions around the globe, this will be the first tour The Carpetbag Brigade conducts in which their indoor character and story driven theatrical work is featured.

The tour will commence with a benefit at a private location in Sonoma County on the 12th and 13th of February followed by a presentation in Santa Cruz at the community minded Project 418 on the 26th and 27th of February. Afterwards The Carpetbag Brigade will perform at Counterpulse in San Francisco on the 5th and 6th of March. There will be a one month pause while the company performs its renowned acrobatic stilt performance “The Vanishing Point” at the Cumbre Tajin festival in Papantlan, Mexico. “You don’t know Jack” returns to headline the Performance West Festival’s Micro Fringe evening April 9th in downtown Los Angeles at xrtc’s Location X. The tour will conclude with a weekend of performances the 16th and 17th of April in Prescott, Arizona sponsored by Tsunami on the Square and Prescott College and a last run hosted by Tucson, Arizona’s esteemed pyrotechnical theatrical company Flamchen at Rhythm Industry Performance Factory on the 22nd and 23rd of April.

"SURREALISM IS ONE OF THOSE CONCEPTS THAT IGNITE AN IMMEDIATE REACTION IN PEOPLE…THE CARPETBAG BRIGADE HOPES YOU ARE READY TO EMBRACE THE WEIRD.” Allan Amundsden, Eureka Times Standard, California

THE COMPANY

The Carpetbag Brigade Physical Theater Company established itself as a cultural entity by touring performing arts productions to diverse destinations around the world. The performance work is distinctive for its breadth and synthesis of disparate performance modalities. The company’s work draws from acrobatic stilts, butoh dance, contact improvisation, and European traditions of physical theater.

Performing both indoors and outdoors, The Carpetbag Brigade is known for fostering a sense of psychic intimacy, poetic dialogue, and mythic imagery in its work. The company has evolved acrobatic stilt work to include pioneering new partnering techniques, and applied modern dance and physical theater forms to create socially reflective performances. The training for participation in the company is rigorous and involves a complex set of unique skills. Training and performing with The Carpetbag Brigade requires actor/dancer/musicians with an embodied understanding and integrated physical vocabulary drawing from Yoga, Pilates, acrobatic stilts, Modern and post-modern dance, Butoh, and keen vocal and physical memory for composing self-devised scores for physical theater montage.

Carpetbag Brigade performances are versatile and accessible and can occur in a variety of venues from black box theaters to fairgrounds and parking lots; from proscenium theaters to outdoor music festivals. The company composes original performances using theories and techniques of self-devised theater. Founder and Director Jay Ruby studied physical theater in Berlin, Germany and Holstebro, Denmark. There, he encountered the work of Eugenio Barba, who developed influential methods of composition and training for physical theater performers. The Carpetbag Brigade’s approach to creating movement, action, and montage can be traced to these roots.

As one of the few physical theater companies in the United States significantly touring acrobatic stiltwork, Carpetbag has used the medium to create shows with an experimental aesthetic, but intended for the large scale, outdoor, popular audiences of spectacle based theater. The Carpetbag Brigade has performed for over 250,000 people over the past eight years, both inside and outside of the United States. The company creates evening length performances set to original music which -- although built around a poetic storyline and dramatic scaffold -- contain no text. This makes the work accessible cross culturally. The Brigade’s mixture of physical theater, modern dance, and acrobatic stilt walking creates a highly specialized art of performance where the worlds of theater, dance, and circus overlap.

During the company's formative years (1997-2003) in Prescott, Arizona, Carpetbag productions exhibited a bold, experimental aesthetic, and were of all kinds: from street theater, to dance, to intimate indoor work, to site-specific outdoor shows, to mini-performances designed for festivals. After moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2003, The Carpetbag Brigade embarked on three annual four-month-long tours of both North and South America. In 2007 they were a company in residence at the Universal Forum of the Cultures in Monterrey, Mexico. In 2008 they performed three of their shows to critical acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. They continue to tour their repertory stiltwork abroad and are diversifying their production aesthetics with “You don’t know Jack”, an intimate black box style performance with character, text, song, story and an original music score played by the cast.

The Carpetbag Brigade’s commitment to presenting work in both urban and rural environments has brought the company to such diverse venues as the Ford Theater in Hollywood, the Hoopa Indian Reservation, the InFringIng Dance festival in Canada, The Lincoln Center in New York City, Dell Arte’s Mad River Edgefest in California, The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, The Burning Man Festival and the El Airo Puro Festival in Bogota, Colombia. In 2007 The Carpetbag Brigade was invited to be in residency at the Universal Forum of Cultures in Monterrey, Mexico to teach twenty local youth their acrobatic stiltwork. “We Arrive like an Echo” produced by Jay Ruby and filmmaker Ishan Vernallis documents the journey of that residency.p>

"SURREALISM IS ONE OF THOSE CONCEPTS THAT IGNITE AN IMMEDIATE REACTION IN PEOPLE…THE CARPETBAG BRIGADE HOPES YOU ARE READY TO EMBRACE THE WEIRD.”
Allan Amundsden, Eureka Times Standard, California