Cave Dogs is an unconventional group of performers who create elaborate 'shadow plays,' on a scrim. In their latest work, "How to Build a Raft," the spoken word, music, dance, projected video, animation and still images come together in a dreamy narrative. In the January 1999 broadcast, Greater Boston Arts visited behind the scenes to see how Cave Dogs creates the captivating effects the audience experiences, including how to make a tiny model skyline appear huge in performance, how tricky it is to coordinate live movement with projected animation and a recorded musical score, and how well nine individual artists have to collaborate to execute the final polished performance.

Below are excerpts from transcripts of interviews with Suzanne Stokes, Christopher Wiley, and James Fossett of the Cave Dogs in which the three speak about the History of the Cave Dogs; the Techniques used in the performance; and the story "How to Build a Raft."

History

Suzanne Stokes

It's a group of several artists. There are ten of us in the core group. It's primarily visual artists, but there are also dancers, a writer, musicians. The visual artists run the spectrum of what visual arts are. It's a collaborative group of people that have chosen to come together to collaborate on a piece of work, and I'm sort of the catalyst. I'm the one that got them all together.

Cave Dogs started in 1992. I was doing a masters of fine arts show at SUNY, New Paltz in metalsmithing and I had these little wooden figures that sort of dangled from the ceiling and would spin. I cast lights on them and they would create shadows which I would draw. We turned the wooden figures into a performance piece. The shadows became the piece, and it was set to music. That was three or four people. Then a lot of people saw that show. It was called "Shadows of Doubt and Other Precarious Truths."

A whole bunch of us got together and created a show called "Fall of Perception" which was based on the myth of Persephone. That we did in a place called the Widow Jane Mine in upstate New York in Rosendale.

It was all cast shadow on the cave interiors. It was a lot about how big the shadow was. You can see the figure. You can see everything that was happening. It was live sound; it was a lot of percussion. And the cave itself was quite a spectacle. There was a lake in there and these big columns would come up. The audience would move to different places, and we would cast light down into the lake and shine up those shadows. The shadows of the water would shine on the ceiling. Then there would be a figure within that. So we're just messing around with the cave itself and how big we could get the shadows.

We would do something for a weekend, and there would be 500, 700 people that would come to each show. It wouldn't even seem like there were very many people in there. They would all sit on hay bales. Part of the deal was going to the cave. I don't even know if they cared who they were going to see or what they were going to see, but it was a good experience for them once they got there. We had it all lit all the way from where you would park all the way into the cave. It was kind of a long walk to get there. It was all lit with candles and bags and stuff like that. So it was this whole magical thing that happened.

Then the next show we did was "Sustenance," which was a very short piece and then "Emily's Circus" and now "How to Build a Raft." So from that moment on from "Sustenance" on or after the cave show, it turned into more of a film-- you are looking at a scrim.

Technique

Suzanne Stokes

What it's become I think is sort of like early film where you are focusing on a scrim, and now we're casting video in front of it as well. It's no longer live music. It's now recorded music, but it's all original music. The music is built at the same time the images are built.

Cave Dog art is hard to explain. It's every kind of art. It's 2-D, it's 3-D, it's movement, it's sound, it's video. Behind the audience is the video projection, and around the audience is the sound. To me it's just a series of layers. You have the lighter, the people in shadow, the scrim, props, another lighter, audience, video. So it's definitely sort of a multi-sensory experience.

James Fossett

The scrim is where it all comes together ultimately. We think of light as our medium, and the scrim would definitely be a canvas of that light and how we project the images on there.

The nice thing about the lights is that you can vary your image. The mobility of them allows you to vary your image and the intensity of the image both in scale, size, contrast, everything quite literally from just the flick of the wrist, just by moving forward or just by pulling back.

It was almost like a three-dimensional film because we do have the scrim which is the plane, if you will, the screen that everything is shown upon.

I think it is very filmic. A lot of the artifices we use -- utilizing zooms to really come in on an object or an image to really play with the scale. Using the lights to pan also in the projected video, a load of pans or slow-mo stuff to really just try to place more emphasis on something that is happening. Play with the sense of motion. That's what really gives it its filmic qualities of those different artifices.

The props may consist of a couple of pieces of plywood just stuck together. But as long as it resembles a table or resembles a chair. Once you put a light on it from behind the scrim, who is to know. That's one of the wonderful things is when people come behind the scrim, it's like wait, this made the shadow? It's cardboard. It's like well, yeah, it's cardboard, but it's okay. So we can make a city out of cardboard.

Actually for this show, we kind of have stepped up in the world so we are making cities out of foam core or making props. I'm a great scavenger, and a lot of stuff are things that we quite literally pick out of other people's trash or drive around town on various trash days and see what's out on the curb.

Christopher Wiley

We use the shadow to tell the story. It's a whole conglomeration of different elements. Each element has its place in the story. The shadows create the visuals along with video projection, slide projection. The sound track almost has a life of its own that also adds to the story.

It's a matter of lighting the person or the prop, the relationship of your light to the prop and the prop to the scrim determines the size. There are those two scales that you can play with in terms of getting different effects on the scrim through the lighting process. So we can create the illusion of a market person standing next to a large cart selling vegetables on the scrim when actually that person is a human being and the cart is about eight inches, ten inches long.

That's how the mechanics of it work. The artistic part comes into play when you want certain effects and we have to go through a process to figure out how to create these effects. So starting out, I figured a flashlight was a flashlight. It took a long time for me to get comfortable with the lights to the point of actually being able to invent effects, in terms of flashing and moving the light around and going back and forth and fades.

A lot of the characteristics of the story come into play when you are lighting, how you fade from scene to scene with a light flashing, getting the props the right sizes, getting inside the props if that's necessary at the right point. Just creating a realistic interaction between the actors of the people playing the parts and these props that we've created to make the environments.

When you're drawing something, you draw it and it's just kind of finished. You can go back and work on it. Performing with the Cave Dogs is much more fluid than that. I think it's a lot more unfinished in a way. I mean we have a finished piece that we've been performing now. But there are a lot of different factors that come into play in terms of just performing it.

It's just a different sort of creation of an image. It's definitely not permanent. As much as we try to keep the performances consistent from time to time, it's always going to be a little different because it's the nature of the beast because we're human beings and not machines.

It's dancing with nine other people. You think sometimes dancing with one other person is hard. You've got like either other people back there that I am dancing with. Sometimes it's great because sometimes we have 15 feet behind that scrim. Sometimes it's crowded because we have ten feet behind the scrim. But we always seem to adjust well enough to make it work.

"How to Build a Raft"

Suzanne Stokes

"How to Build a Raft" is three short stories all interlinked by one story that tells you how to build a raft. That story is a verbatim story told by Harry Williams and his family, Pearlene, Oniele, and Kerresha. It's their voices in the performance telling the story of how you build a raft in Jamaica.

I never started with a story before. We always started with props. People would make props, and we would see what we could do with the props. Then we would make a story from the props. I'm coming out of a background of sculpture and metalsmithing and all sorts of things like that so that's where I started. Whereas this particular piece started with a story. The writer, Jeanne Scheper, researched lots of different people's stories, including the migrant folks of the mid-Hudson Valley, myself, the third story is her story. She took all of these different cultures and montaged or collaged them together, scupted them together to make "How to Build a Raft."

All three stories, what they have in common is the themes of migration movement and gain and loss of community and family.

The first story is called "Puller's Pull." That is about the migrant farm worker's population in upstate New York. My husband Jim and I worked with them for about six years teaching kids art and photography through a place called the Mid-Hudson Migrant Education Center, which was housed on SUNY, New Paltz campus which was where I went to grad school which is how we ended up knowing about it.

They were Jamaican, Haitian, South and Central American, North American. It was primarily Jamaican and Haitian when we started. So kind of in a small, little area of the Hudson Valley, you had a lot of different faces of migrant workers which is pretty unusual. So they had all these different stories that were radically different. For that first story, Jean put a whole bunch of stories together and made the conglomerate migrant story.

The second story, called "Charting a Path," is more about my generation of people and those things, migration movement, gain and loss of community and family, and how we're all moving around leaving our homes going off to school, going off to get jobs. You have to re-create this family.

A lot of people in my generation and generations around mine move a lot so they are constantly re-creating this thing like their support group which becomes their family essentially. Because they may never go back home. That's kind of how I felt. I was always at odds with how to do that and what it means. Every time we moved, the last move to Boston I was thinking man, I just can't do this anymore. I just have to constantly re-create this group of people not only for things like Cave Dogs but also just to be with. And you're leaving all these people that you really care about all the time. So that's kind of what that story is. It's a little bit about how that story got written. It's actually changed in its tone. So she was sort of talking about me in that story.

It's about this woman and her rabbit and these choices in her life and how everybody has to make-- especially women with this whole like-- babies, careers, art work. There is an extra added thing in there that's huge. Since women's lib and being career oriented people now as a rule, then how does the whole family thing fit in. It's a symbol of all those choices you have to make. By making one choice, something else is going to have to go. Maybe it will come back. Maybe it won't come back. So that's kind of what that's about.

The third story is a direct true story from beginning to end about Jean, the writer, and her brother David growing up in Baltimore with having this eccentric kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Walker, who would walk all over Baltimore and go through the markets. She had Jean help her do her shopping because Jean was so tall she figured she could walk faster than other people. So they became friends and then Jean and David would go over to their house for dinner. It was just this bizarre experience they had. Like their mother didn't even know where they were I don't think.

So one day Mrs. Walker was down in the docks in Baltimore and ran into these five Norwegian sailor brothers who were all seven feet tall. She invited them over to dinner. She invited Jean and David over for dinner. She wanted them all to meet because she believed that Jean and David would be their size one day, that they were going to be really big people. She wanted them to meet. That's how it all ends. "You will be giants one day, and it's time you met your own people." Indeed, Jean and David are very, very tall people. He is six-foot-seven; she is six something. It's just this bizarre story about Mrs. Walker and how she put these people together, these two communities of people because they had something in common.