How To Build A Fire: February @ Puffin Cultural Forum
STORYTELLING
Thursday, February 29th, 7-9pm
@ Puffin Cultural Forum
20 Puffin Way, Teaneck, New Jersey 07666-4111
(167 Bus from Port Authority)
Register now!
Themes: Leap of Faith and Leap into the Void
It’s the final show for Season 9 of How to Build a Fire. We started this ride in February 2023, so February 2024 makes a bonus month … just as this month has a bonus day. Join us for a Leap Day celebration of storytelling and chance-taking. The themes for this closing show are “Leap of Faith” and “Leap into the Void.” The best kinds of chances to take.
How do we embrace (or reject) the unknown? What is our relationship with risk, with uncertainty? Come out to Teaneck, to the headquarters of our funding partner, the Puffin Foundation, as we bring back to the stage some of the storytellers who have wowed us this season. It’s our “best of” show, and we want to take this leap with you!
Lisa Jean Moore
Lisa Jean Moore is a feminist medical sociologist who teaches at Purchase College, SUNY and Bedford Hill Correctional Facility. She’s written several books on a variety of subjects including human sperm, urban honey bees, transgenic goats, and horseshoe crabs. The mother of three daughters, Lisa Jean is an avid fiction reader and loves to go to the beach – combining the two activities is her version of heaven.
Lillian Bustle
Lillian Bustle is an award-winning Burlesque performer and emcee, published essayist, TEDx speaker, podcaster, vocalist, and gleeful loudmouth about body liberation. You can hear Lillian on All The Fucks, a podcast about caring too much, with actor and writer Jen Ponton, and messages from her TEDx talk, Stripping Away Negative Body Image, have been shared by millions across the globe.
Performing Burlesque since 2012, Lillian has been featured in shows and festivals across North America, from Anchorage to Austin.
In 2019, Lillian’s performances came under fire from local government, being classified as obscene. She fought back, won, and helped rewrite Jersey City’s antiquated laws around nudity and “obscene devices.” She received a ruling from the NJ Attorney general deeming her work “legitimate entertainment”, and received the Women of Action award from Jersey City for her free speech advocacy.
She currently co-produces Bounce House: A Burlesque Celebration of Body Diversity with Abby Fantastic, performing to all sold-out audiences. Her personal mission is to help us all redefine the word “beautiful.”
Laz Vic
Winner of the 2007 HBO NYILFF best short film “REWIND.” He was also a featured comedian in the 2007 Hollywood Latino Laugh Festival and 2008 TBS Las Vegas Comedy Festival.
Vin Baker
Vin Baker is a New Jersey based stand up comedian. He is known for ability to tell jokes in the form of stories. He tells jokes about his real life, family and antics. Vin is part of an online Sketch Show called “Broke A$$ Sketch Show” and has performed all over.
Mary Edwards
Mary Edwards is a composer and sound artist whose interdisciplinary practice encompasses themes of temporality, impermanence, nostalgia and the natural world that recur throughout her work.
She is interested in the invisible architecture and the emotive, historic, cinematic and spatial properties of sound. Listening is an inherent and integral part of her process in conveying how all sounds have the potential to be habitable, and can be transformative once you get inside them, as they are simultaneously intimate and immense.
Drawing partly on sound as a vibrational phenomenon and Space Analogues, her piece, Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place, is, according to Edwards, “an ode rather than an elegy” to the transforming Arctic landscape, climate vulnerability, elemental sensuality and terrestrial/space connectivity. Edwards began this project while sailing on an artist and scientist research expedition above the 78th Parallel to Svalbard (halfway between Norway and the North Pole) to make field recordings and listen to the rhythm and breath of our planet from another pulse point. She documented sound properties of glacial geology and oceanographic data sonification of the distinct groans and reverberant calving ice tumbling from the sublime glacier walls into the depths of fjords, the movement of subterranean rivers, Beluga whale song and vocal intonations intended to provide access for all by “de-centralizing the centered and un-othering the others.”
Her recent projects include Fathom, a site-related soundscape launched during the 2023 World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) Conference, Listening Pasts/Listening Futures and Conservation/Conversation, both for Atlantic Center for the Arts; Endeavour: A Space Trilogy for the NASA Expedition of Dr. Mae C. Jemison, an ambient operetta commemorating the American astronaut’s orbit around Earth; The Call in the Limitless Space, a permanent interactive installation for Wa Na Wari/Seattle based on reclamation of natural and architectural spaces in the city’s Central District; Everyday Until Tomorrow, a conceptual “Library Music” soundtrack for TWA Terminal 5 at JFK airport; Something to (Be)Hold, a large-scale site-specific public sound work produced concurrently with her first career survey by The Grimshaw-Gudewicz Art Gallery; and Tamalpais Higher, a geophonic reimagining of a seismic event based on a blind thrust fault running through Mount Tamalpais north of the San Francisco Bay.
She has an extended discography of recording projects, and serves as arranger and leader for her multistylistic ensemble.
She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Sound and Architecture from Goddard College, and has been awarded residencies and commissions at the ACA Soundscape Field Station at Canaveral National Seashore, Headlands Center for the Arts, The Arctic Circle, Wa Na Wari, InSitu Polyculture Commons, The Grimshaw-Gudewicz Foundation, Condé Nast Gallery and The Joshua Tree Cultural Preservation Center.
How to Build a Fire is a community storytelling series where a diverse group of individuals share real-life, personal narratives centered around a different theme each last Thursday of the month. At times funny, at times sad, their stories weave together a broad illustration of the human experience. How To Build A Fire will takes place at Open Source Gallery -a welcoming, nurturing, intimate, safe environment- where, monthly, one can see a new exhibition installed by an array of up-and-coming and established visual artists.
How To Build a Fire was founded by Terence Degnan. This year Stacie Evans and Lana Siebel will be co-curating and co-hosting.
Stacie Evans writes in long hand. With a fountain pen. Because she’s that girl: the wannabe homesteading, selectively Luddite girl who is addicted to her phone and regularly overshares online. She met James Baldwin in Paris … which will ever and always be the most glamorous and dramatic thing about her. Her writing has appeared in New South, After Ferguson, Bellingham Review, and The Rumpus.
Lana Siebel performs all over the US, including NYC, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, NJ, and Washington DC. She was selected as a featured comedian at The Connecticut Comedy Festival along with comedians such as Gilbert Gottfried, The Headliner Series in NY, The Punch Line Comedy Club in Philadelphia, as well as the Fairfield Comedy Club in Connecticut. As an actress, Lana is featured in numerous films and off Broadway plays. She studied acting at Lee Strasberg Institute and HB Studios with Austin Pendleton. Lana was also a competitive International Latin style Ballroom dancer ranked internationally and 7th in the US! She immigrated as a refugee from Kharkiv, Ukraine when she was seven years old with her family to Brooklyn, NY where she grew up and now resides.
This program is supported by the Puffin Foundation
