Savannah Reich on Madeline Shuron

Dear Madeline; 

This is the first time I’ve seen your work! I caught your except of “i don’t have the right words for it yet” at Miniball this year, and I was instantly charmed by your intellectual energy (shaved head & round glasses), and by your repeated false starts at lip-syncing to “Hello, Dolly”. You followed that up with a series of moments that pinged against one another and built up layers of meaning around the ideas of making a professional career in the arts, wanting people to like you, and frogs. 

This was an excerpt of the final piece, and while the connections between bits are not fully clear in my head yet, I felt secure in your guidance through them. For a couple of moments I got worried that it was going in a kindergarten-teacher direction- I have an extremely low tolerance for twee- but you got me right back when you started ripping the arms and legs off your own puppets. There was a shagginess to the whole thing; it felt like you were refusing, very deliberately, to make anything shiny or clean. One of the things you talk about in the show is how frogs don’t belong in the land or the water, and you connected this with the idea of the artist who makes art the center of their life, but refuses to do it the way they have been taught. There is some more mainstream path not taken for you, which you leave fairly open in this excerpt but which I easily filled in with my own MFA trauma. Instead, you scoot adorably taped-together frog puppets across the stage, and choose connecting with the audience over impressing us. There is a stunning moment when you sing a simple folk song, and we encounter the easy gift of your voice. It was an uncomplicated delight, but also a reminder that you could play the mainstream art game and win, if you wanted to; instead, you are off-roading and seeing what emerges.

Some of my favorite work in Philly is built on this combination of shining talent and intentional mess. If a performance is polished, it sometimes feels low risk and leaves me cold. Playing at the junction of excellence and mess puts you in conversation with some of my personal favorite makers in town- Annie Wilson, Colby Calhoun, and John Miller Giltner come to mind. As I watched your show, I felt in community with you and with all these artists as I make my own messy work, and as we all continue to awkwardly discover whatever it is that we are truly, deeply called to create- beyond trying to win anyone’s approval. 

Thank you! Excited to see the rest! 

Savannah