Family Acid Trip

Overview

Family Acid Trip is a collaborative work of experimental theater and music about a family trying to heal themselves through a shared psychedelic experience. Utilizing elements/influences of clowning, liturgical chant, bouffon, musical theatre, folk music, and noise, the show will explore themes of ego death, decomposition, rebirth, rewilding, and bird calls. The family finds themselves in the perfect spot, a field beside a river, where the natural world speaks vividly to them as they wait expectantly for this mysterious, unfamiliar experience to unfold. The work explores the power of this time of waiting, and what blooms within it. We engage with this subject matter through play and music, in the process dislodging old ways of seeing, and finding a new vision of what constitutes sanity.

Cannonball, produced by Almanac Dance Circus Theatre, is the first and largest independent festival hub of the Philadelphia Fringe that presents risk-taking independent artists in back-to-back performances next to delicious lounge spaces, fostering creative collisions and community conversation.

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About the Artist

Hannah Mitchell is an actor, theater-maker, and educator whose process is guided by the improvisational arts of clown & improv. She collaborates on new and experimental works of theater, devises live comedy bits, and regularly performs with her improv group, Milk Run. Hannah has performed around NYC at The Public, The Park Ave Armory, Lincoln Center, The New Ohio, HERE Arts, Target Margin Theater, The Brick, LifeWorld and The Brooklyn Comedy Collective, among others. She is currently in the process of establishing a clown company, called WüfPak, with some of the funniest people she knows! Hannahmitchell.net

Nathan Repasz is a New York-based drummer, vocalist, improviser, theatre artist, music director, and composer. His solo language+percussion performance uses presentation-style speech, gibberish, sung interludes, and extended vocal technique to explore the liminality of sense/nonsense and groove/noise. His piece “National Hot Dog Day” was featured in the 2023 Emergency Index and he recently delivered his “Lecture on Something” as part of ?!: New Works. He has performed in Iceland, Poland, Germany, Czechia, and the U.K., and at Carnegie Hall, The Kitchen, SXSW, and NPR’s Mountain Stage. Nathanrepasz.com

Nathan and Hannah are both multidisciplinary artists who have an overlapping obsession with the absurd in language, using music to express that which language fails to, and groove/drone as a way of exploring performative individuation and unison. In past works, they’ve taken inspiration from auctioneer chant, consciousness alteration, garlic, country music, and local news to explore sincerity, the art of the ramble, family systems, improvisational play, and meeting the mania of the present day with a taste of its own medicine. They make work collaboratively with the experimental performance group CHILD.

Credits