Artists & Projects Directory
Dan Hurlin
Disfarmer, premiering February 2009 at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, NY, is a puppet theater work inspired by the life of American portrait photographer Mike Disfarmer (1884-1959). Something of a small town "Boo Radley," Disfarmer operated a photography studio in Heber Springs, Arkansas, where for years locals and tourists lined up to have their picture made. Using glass plate photography long after it was obsolete, Disfarmer left his subjects to decide for themselves how to act in front of his lens. When thousands of these glass plates were discovered in the 1970’s, Disfarmer’s photographs were acknowledged as a stunning achievement for their exquisite artistry, their profound empathy for their subjects, and their invaluable documentation of a way of life that has all but vanished from the United States. How could a man who openly disdained his fellow citizens portray them with such compassion?
Director and designer Dan Hurlin, working with playwright Sally Oswald and composer Dan Moses Schreier, has recreated a visceral sense of Mike Disfarmer’s interior and exterior worlds, illuminating the contradictions in the life of this American hermit and portrait artist. The production features the American style of “tabletop” puppetry, projections of Disfarmer’s photographs and images produced by old optical techniques; and a sound score with haunting music from antique recording technologies (such as Edison Wax disks), re-contextualized and mixed with modern sampling techniques. Disfarmer himself—alone, but not despairing, longing, but not lonely—is represented by a series of puppets, each an exact reprint of the last, except two inches smaller. Disfarmer shrinks like the rest of rural America, until he is completely gone, and we are left with the quiet and nervous expectancy of standing perfectly still for a long exposure.