Lou Harrison’s
Coyote Stories
Coyote, a troublemaker, prankster, and creator, comes to life in a series of four American Indian Creation Myths, narrated to the audience and accompanied by Gamelan music, a contemporary composition by Lou Harrison. Wendy Morton is the director/designer, combining reflections and shadow and light puppets that overlap to create the predicaments that Coyote finds himself in. Creators/puppeteers Ramon Abad and Art Grueneberger invent magical images.
World Premiere: Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, England, November 1997.
Produced by ShadowLight Productions. Directed and designed by Wendy Morton with music by the iconoclastic, innovative composer Lou Harrison. Co-created and performed by Ramon Abad, Art Grueneberger, and Wendy Morton.
Letter from the Director/Designer Wendy Morton:
Between bits of chocolate and rude jokes, with less than 3 weeks before performing in England, Art Grueneberger, Ramon Abad and I sit in a large dark room brainstorming images of Coyote. Coyote is a god, a troublemaker, and a prankster, led by his desires rather than reason. He is the main character in our 4 American Indian creation stories. The stories will be sung by a narrator accompanied by a 15-piece Gamelan orchestra playing original music by local composer Lou Harrison.
I have been experimenting with various light puppets. In this production, reflections, shadow, and light puppets overlap each other in a series of surrealistic images to portray Coyote falling into different realities. I am hopeful that the outcome will be a visually transporting experience and a new venue for that crazy coyote.
Coyote Stories was remounted at San Francisco's Zeum Studios in the Spring of 1999.
Creation Stories
Development of Creation Stories with the San Francisco Art Institute, the Institute for Native Knowledge, the Karuk tribe, and Native American artists Julian Lang and Brian Tripp has been an intensive process of discovery and collaboration, which resulted in an original large-scale shadow theater piece.
Karuk creation stories encompass a kind of deep ecology essential to our understanding of California's history and evolution. Every prominent feature of California's landscape has or has had its own story: before there were people, there were spirits who roamed the Earth. When the people arrived, the spirits transformed into features of the landscape leaving behind stories and songs which transmit tribal wisdom, psychological understanding, and profound knowledge of the cycles of nature.
