A COOCOOHANDLER Preview Performance

The Boxgame

The lights go down in the theater and the buzz of the audience settles to a muffled hush. A female maestro enters and steps up to a conductor's podium in the center of the audience. On the main stage there is a giant cardboard cube. The maestro faces the cube and pauses. An announcer, obviously soused, introduces the world premier of Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde. At the end of the announcement the maestro raises her baton and begins conducting. The maestro conducts elegantly, but there is no orchestra, no sound.

As the maestro proceeds with her work, she is eventually joined by four blindfolded dancers, each conducting to her own mute symphony. Still there is silence. Then, with a wholly different sense of meter and intention, short bursts of sound erupt from within the giant cardboard cube on the main stage. We hear:

a trumpet

a string bass

a saxophone

a keyboard

a guitar

drums!

The sound bursts grow more frequent. More dancers enter the stage as if summoned by this cacophony. At first they taunt the maestro and her fellow conductors, then they join them to form a roiling cluster of movement. With ever-mounting density the musical pandemonium draws the tangled skein of dancers' bodies toward the giant cardboard cube. They touch and feel the measure of its sides. Then they take hold of the cube and tear the cardboard apart, revealing a huddle of musicians driving a furious pulse. COOCOOHANDLER (though yet to be named) is hatched.

The Boxgame, and hence COOCOOHANDLER coalesced around the germinal performances of David Yearwood's "Captain Chaos" street theatre and various formats that he and Matt Hausmann explored as part of the Cucaracha Theater's "Underground Soap" series. After developing their music in a band format that included Michael Leonhart and Tom Burnett--COOCOOHANDLER trumpet wunderkind--the group ventured into acts of theatrical absurdity. A classic example is their musical creation of the infamous "Singapore Caning," complete with a giant candy cane-wielding samurai and blood packed lined tighty whiteys.

Compositional slapstick continued to characterize subsequent performances. It took on a remarkable shape at a dance benefit held at The Collective Unconscious. For this performance COOCOOHANDLER was introduced as the Marsalis Brothers:

The Marsalis Brothers

Dressed in tuxedos, David Yearwood and guest performer, Paul D'Jong, enter the stage with string bass and cello. Their duet commenses with a lyrical bass melody. The cellist accompanies the melody by picking his nose. After further muscial development, the piece builds steam as the bass player performs an anxious, high-speed strip-tease while tap dancing. Guitarist Paul Braucher then joins the duo with power chords from his electric Stratocaster. David brings the movement to a close with a "Butoh meets Chippendales" cadence, string bass over his head and pants around his ankles.

This closing moment of deep resolution is suddenly transgressed by a scuttling four-foot brown paper blob which, despite its purposeful entrance, seems to possess very little intelligence. Disappointed by the interruption, the bass and cello players exit the stage, leaving Paul to musically scold the brown paper blob with his guitar. Paul himself then leaves the stage in consternation.

Alone now, the brown paper blob suddenly displays a new-found vocabulary of electric bass yelps and whimpers. The blob surprises everyone with a touching soliloquy of sounds and diminutive-yet-expressive movements that reveals a deeper emotional longing.

In early 1995 the group performed on numerous occasions in New York at the Cucaracha Theater, Surf Reality, and Sun Mountain Café. They performed various pieces including Sound Cannon, Armed Response, and the highly endeared Joint Compound. In these shows COOCOOHANDLER aspired to develop an expansive performance style, now referred to as the "Cumulative Performance Technique," whereby an accretion of sonic, thematic, and visual materials work together to generate impressions of both bounty and demolition. This concept called for an expanded roster of musicians which came to include:

Micheal Leonhart, trumpet, percussion
Jessica Gilliam, string bass
Bohdan Hillash, reeds
John Horvitz, tenor sax
Taymur Sullivan, saxophones
Rebecca Weintraub, soprano
Elliot Levin, tenor sax & flute

By the end of this series of performances--a little over a year since the Boxgame--the name COOCOOHANDLER came to be the name of this post-Freudian jazz punk cabaret performance orchestra.