ballad of the bear king, 2010

Ballad of the Bear King was an immersive theater fairy tale that took place in a bar called the Blind Mule in Downtown Mobile in 2010. The production required a crew of 20 people who doubled as both performers and tech crew as the set went up and came down over the coarse of each performance. 

All photos by Sarah Parvardeh

collaboration. 

The project began with a fairy tale i had written based on my grandmother's bedtime stories. My grandmother was a huge horror fan and the stories she told always included my brother and I, and often had dark or twisted events. I brought the story to Michael Waldron and Adam Taylor to help actualize. 

What developed was hybrid theater. The crew resembled a roving gypsy troupe dressed mostly as animals, that used music, visual art and installation for the sake of storytelling. The tale centers around two small children who run away and find home through an experience of trauma. Each event was followed by a meal of pancakes and spaghetti. 

image from original story-board, 2010

" Playing on ambiguity, fable, vernacular tradition, this story seeks palpable catharsis without moralistic closure. It is a fairytale for the forlorn, a hymn of nightmares. 

Artist Elizabet Elliott’s work is grounded in community based production, utilizing local and site-specific resources, found objects and cultural ephemera to find the narrative conjunction between fiction and memory. Her work plays on what is vernacular, vagrant, rogue, found, kept, and taken for granted."

Crew

  • elizabet elliott
  • adam taylor
  • michael waldron
  • jimmy lee
  • josh bond
  • ben jacobs
  • lauren ashley fussell
  • nadine delati
  • ryan jetten
  • zach depolo
  • a j tomkins
  • trey lane
  • riley brenes
  • courntey matthews
  • and many others...


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