Kaleidoscopic Bonehouse (2021)
Omer Gal and Jacquelyn Marie Shannon
Full length live-streamed production, performed inside (and between) 10 animated virtual worlds. Cookie Tongue transports into different worlds through a magic door and engages in micro-adventures in-between using animated figures and puppets. Performed with guitar, singing saw, glockenspiel, percussion, and orphaned toys, to send you tumbling down the Cookie-hole, through sugar-ash and rolling sleeves of starlight.
Asheville Fringe Arts Festival - Award for artist who most challenged and pushed the boundaries between art forms
Pittsburgh Fringe Festival - Award for Best Digital Effects
Borderlight International Theatre + Fringe Festival Cleveland
Cincy Fringe Festival
“Kaleidoscopic Bone House…is a sumptuous feast for the eyes and ears, a triumph of craftsmanship, and a genuinely original melange of mediums that is probably only possible in this moment of virtual theater.
…hallucinogenic and a little grotesque, but also very warm and almost childlike. They’re Michel Gondry meets David Lynch, or Hunter S. Thompson meets Sesame Street. Once I suspended my expectations for a firm plot or conventional storytelling, I really felt carried away by Cookie Tongue’s dreamlike performance.
The “loose” premise of Kaleidoscopic Bone House is that Cookie Tongue and we, the audience, are both involved in the casting of a spell — for what purpose, I never quite gleaned. The spell requires items like “a frozen vial of electric tears” and “a spoon from the mouth of the paper earth.” In turn, these items can only be found by journeying to a range of different settings, perhaps in different dimensions, and by singing different songs, of which Cookie Tongue has plenty.
Utilizing different visual mediums like charcoal, pastel, stop-motion animation, and puppetry, Cookie Tongue creates phantasmagoric landscapes against which the actual performers are inserted. This interplay of prerecorded video and live performance — among animation, puppetry, and music — is honestly something I’ve never seen before. It took me a while to get used to, but once I abandoned myself to the chaos, it was really quite beautiful.
…I don’t know what software or technique Cookie Tongue employed to make this effect but it is really striking. I do hope that other performers can be as creative as Cookie Tongue in virtual performance pieces that push the boundaries of this new medium. We’re going to be all-virtual for at least another year, it seems... so performing artists still have time to create something genuinely new, bespoke for the pandemic era.”
- Michael Poandl, Asheville Stages
“Very rarely do I find a theatre group that intersects my theatre sensibilities and my musical sensibilities. When I do it usually involves people dressed in crazy costumes wearing makeup and playing instruments you have to Google. You know that stuff that’s a bit too weird for an NPR Tiny Desk Concert. I’ve gotten to review and interview a couple of people like that who I consider heroes. Then as a part of the Pittsburgh Fringe we ran straight into another melding of two obsessions of mine. Kaleidoscope Bonehouse by Cookie Tongue is a melding of digital effects and psychedelic style folk music. Listening and watching both will make you think you just took LSD and apparently that is exactly what’s supposed to happen. So let’s take a walk into this world they created…
The one thing that I can say with absolute certainty is that the design of this production was some of the best that I had ever seen. I have seen some great green screen backdrops before and I can tell that these were professionally done. There were no “auras” or “halos” around them as they walked or moved. This wasn’t just a backdrop behind an extension. This looked beautiful in master shots and close up. On top of all that, I can’t even comprehend the artistic mastery behind it. I have said the words “every frame is a painting” before but I meant it more about this than any work. I did after ten minutes of watching this.
Not only that but it was an entire world design. The amount of time and effort that went into designing this amount of nightmare fuel is super impressive. Very rarely in indie theatre do you get to show this kind of world to your audience AND have this much control over it…With Digital Theatre you can put some wonderful art direction or design into pieces where it would never have been feasible before. You can show people your world like never before. While the world that Cookie Tongue has shared with us haunts us to this very day we now know exactly what their style is. This is their perfect world ::shudder::”
-Ricky and Dana Young-Howze, Pittsburgh Fringe Theatre Review