Puppeteer Carrie Morris discusses her project The Firefighters and using unconventional and experiential art to address issues such as redlining, development, and water justice in Detroit. The Living X podcast is hosted by Ryan Myers-Johnson, executive director of Sidewalk Detroit, and edited/mixed by Wayne Ramocan of Red Carpet Lounge. This episode features music by Pamela Wise. The Living X podcast is a product of rootoftwo and made possible with support from The Kresge Foundation.
This episode was recorded remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic.
About "The Firefighters"
Set to audio interviews collected over the past six years, The Firefighters is a contemporary puppet performance illustrating the effects that redlining and disinvestment in Detroit neighborhoods have had on the physical bodies and mental health of its firefighters.
About Carrie Morris
Carrie Morris is a director and puppeteer who choreographs handmade objects to tell stories. The plays she stages are well-researched, involve multiple performers, and typically designed for adult audiences. Her works can be large scale (using life-sized elephant puppets) or small scale (3” silhouettes). In her performances, puppets are representations of bodies whose stories require clarity, urgency, and care to transmit.
Carrie is interested in performance that includes multimedia elements, performing objects, and performance in experimental spaces. She was a Fulbright grantee in the field of performance art for multimedia shadow puppetry in Indonesia. Her creative work has been seen at NYC Fringe Festival, Detroit Institute of Art, Seattle’s Annex Theater, Detroit’s DLECTRICITY, and as a guest artist with the Grand Rapids Symphony. Her work has been supported by the Jim Henson Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. Morris holds a BFA in directing from NYU and an MFA in studio art from the University of Michigan. She is the director of Carrie Morris Arts Production (CMAP), an intimate performance space and forum for puppetry and theater in Detroit.
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INTRO (00:05):
In this episode, politics and puppets, Ryan sits down with puppeteer, Carrie Morris to discuss her project, The Firefighters, and the ways she uses unconventional and experiential art to address issues such as redlining development and water justice in Detroit. This episode was recorded remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ryan Myers-Johnson (00:34):
Hi everyone. My name is Ryan Myers-Johnson. I am coming to you from Detroit, Michigan. I'm an artist and curator, and I am so excited to be joined here today with Carrie Morris director in innovative puppeteer who choreographs handmade objects to tell stories. Welcome, Carrie,
Carrie Morris (00:56):
Thank you Ryan for talking today.
Ryan Myers-Johnson (01:01):
We're really just exploring, you know, the work that you presented with Art X Detroit and you know, what's going on with your creative practice now. So, would you mind telling us a little bit of who you are in your creative work?
Carrie Morris (01:16):
Sure. So as you kind of provided that eloquent summary, I've been working with puppets and performing objects as a director for maybe I think like 10 or 15 years now. My background is in directing theater. I currently run a small nonprofit in the Northwest neighborhood of Detroit that's on the North side of Hamtramck in the West Campau East Davidson Banglatown area. We have a small intimate theater. That's about a 40 seat capacity. And then we also have a 1.3 acre green space that we operate as an outdoor amphitheater and we present performance works there. And we also maintain it as a public green space when it's not actively being programmed. So the work that I did for AXD that gave us an opportunity to revisit some of the workshops and work we had been doing on a project called the firefighter project, which was based on a series of interviews, audio interviews that I had been doing with Detroit fire department staff and specifically this one group of firefighters.
Carrie Morris (02:30):
Those interviews had taken place over the course of five or six years and the AXD presentation allowed us to revisit those interviews with the current cohort of puppeteers and company members that we've been working with for the past couple of years, gave us the opportunity to rehearse with some of those audio recordings and also to get some puppet coaching from some national artists and what that time that presentation really great. And that iteration, the firefighter project was very rich and we developed some really great material. But it also gave me a chance to think about that material, you know, that I had been working with for however many years in kind of a larger context. Most of those interviews were recorded pre Detroit bankruptcy, and then right after Detroit bankruptcy, because I've been doing them for so long.
Carrie Morris (03:24):
And it gave me a chance to think about some of the qualities and the content of things, those firefighters brought up not as just a system that was specific to what the firefighters go through working in a city that has its share of blight and has had its share of problems with arson and fire. But also thinking about those systems on a national level and thinking about this idea of what the history is within a physical landscape of invisible processes that we may not hear a lot about or know a lot about and what the physical evidence can be that's left over from those processes. And that's, that's an idea that then generated comparisons to well, what are these, what are the historic precedents to some of the issues that we're seeing here? What are the national precedents what our contemporary day yeah, what are historic precedents?
Carrie Morris (04:21):
So it, it really kinda was the springboard for some of the threads that started on a larger project of which the firefighter component, the firefighter interviews were one piece of but really expanded the work in scale in terms of scale and scope. And on that project is called the weight of air and the weight of air looks at again, this idea of how do we use puppetry and performing arts and audio interviews as a way to eliminate the physical effects of invisible processes on the landscape around us.
Ryan Myers-Johnson (04:59):
That's a lot, you've got a lot going on. So let me unpack some of that because from the place that you're working to, the mediums that you're working with to the people that you're working with there's just a whole world of interest. So the first thing I actually want to ask you is what inspired you to start interviewing Detroit firefighters? When I think of puppetry, I don't necessarily think about the stories of Detroit firefighters.
Carrie Morris (05:27):
I had participated in a women's directing festival called box Fest, Detroit, the festival pays for one director to attend an acting and directing workshop at the purple Rose theater in Chelsea. So that was my piece was voted as somebody that they would want to sponsor doing that. So I was able to take a three week acting directing workshop with guy Sandoval, who is the artistic director at the purple Rose. And in that workshop, I met a bunch of different actors and directors that I'm actually still some of whom I'm still working with. This was in like, I don't know, 2010, maybe 2011. This was a long time ago. And one of the people that took that workshop was an actor who was also a full time firefighter for the city of Detroit. And Cameron PHN is his name. And at the at the time I think, Oh man, I can't remember the ladder company that he was the driver for, but he was the engine driver.
Carrie Morris (06:21):
I had started talking to him about his work in Detroit and he was interested in my practice in Detroit and I, at the same time was asked to appear as a speaker in a morning series that you may remember called Creative Mornings Detroit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I they were doing a morning series about art and fear and they asked me to appear on it and I was like, well, I don't really know if what I do is you know, I don't know if there's like so much fear involved really, but when I think about art and fear, there's this one person I just met who I think really actually it would be really great. So, so I asked if we could go like my friend Cameron, and I could go on this talk together and we did a panel discussion and it was really interesting.
Carrie Morris (07:08):
And I asked if I could just interview him more about what he did and then talking to him. He introduced me to other people in the engine house and they introduced me to other people at other engine houses. And it just kind of, everybody was really supportive and, and happy to yeah, happy to contribute to the project. It just became really clear that there were so many, this was also around the same time that I think the Stephen Colbert show like, or maybe it was some newspaper had put out a video of just the lack of resources that a lot of Detroit fire department engine houses were trying to work with at that time, like file their reports online. But the city didn't pay for the engine houses to have internet. So the firefighters had to like pay out of their own pockets for internet so they could do their job.
Carrie Morris (07:54):
And then someone had set up a Coke can with some change on it. One of the firefighters, because their bell that announced that they had like a fire call, their bell had been broken, but this was a Jerry rig system that would fall over and be the alert that they had to like get on the truck and go fight a fire. So they were, there was a lot of national attention about like what just how they were doing their job with, with lack of resources. And so I thought that that was something that needed more of a spotlight, more people needed to know about that.
Ryan Myers-Johnson (08:24):
Yeah. So you mentioned a statement about illuminating invisible processes. So it sounds like some of your work may have been illuminating. Some of the things that the fire that this hidden world that firefighters are dealing with. So I guess it gives me an impression that this is not your elementary take on firefighters. Sometimes we think about firefighters is, you know, what do you want to be when you grow up? I want to be a firefighter. I want to be a nurse, but this is a more mature at some of the things that firefighters are dealing with.
Carrie Morris (08:58):
Totally. And I appreciate your, your taking. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in like what we're working on that I forget about explaining the context behind some of the puppetry styles that we employ, that I employ in my work, because I just assume that everybody knows, but there there's, a lot of people have assumptions about puppetry that are associated with like kids programming and educational programming. I think last year, maybe a year or two ago was like the first time that I started to make work. That was specifically all ages. It hasn't been some, a form of puppetry that I am super versed in. So this piece specifically the firefighter project and also the weight of air it's very much a piece for adult audiences, the content and the pace is very much for adults. That being said, we, you know, in the weight of air performances that we did in this past January, late January, there were kids and, and family members, like all ages, family members of performers and different community members and our audiences, and they were pretty engaged by it.
Carrie Morris (10:03):
But it's not, it's not a show that's like specifically for kids. Part of the reason for me using puppets and performing objects, I think there's a richness there formally in having a, an object that can reflect some of the processes that may be experienced by the physical body in a way that we wouldn't be able to see if we used a live actor for the landscape. I think puppet landscapes we can present in, in miniature and get a sense of the great scale upon which some of these processes are affecting our landscape, so that it's not a story about one house or one neighborhood. It's a story about the whole city and we can show we can show the whole city. And, and as we work on this project with our team of collaborators that are encompassing artists from across the country, we're seeing that a lot of the processes that we're, we're kind of talking about within this show. You know, they're, they're also not specific to Detroit. These historic processes happen in many cities.
Ryan Myers-Johnson (11:13):
So let's talk a little bit about some of these historic processes. I'm still thinking about Detroit and our sort of unique relationship with fire. You know, Detroit has had, you know, history of, you know, arsons and home abandonment and certain things that certainly have affected the overall landscape of Detroit. Can you eliminate a little bit more, you know, what are the type of processes that you're exploring, not just with fire, but it sounds like there are other social issues that you're working through.
Carrie Morris (11:49):
One of the things that came out of this kind of longterm interviews with this group of firefighters pre and post bankruptcy was we, we, I did I think in 2013 or 2014, I did an iteration of the project and was focusing on the firefighters stories. And one of the things that happened that resulted from the negotiations with the bankruptcy is that the firefighters insurance after post retirement, after they retired, was no longer paid for by the city. And so one of the firefighters in the group of guys that I had interviewed he ended up retiring and then was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and ended up passing from that. And it, I made the connection in my mind that there is some, there was something to the late stakes stage diagnosis that had happened and a lack of insurance coverage, like quality insurance coverage that may not have happened if that negotiation, if that insurance had been paid for, for me, it became about what happens when these larger systems are not caring for the people that they are asking to work within these systems.
Carrie Morris (13:15):
So it kind of, I guess I bring up that as like one early example of that started from firefighters stories, but then seemed to point to larger systems that I wanted to look at. Thinking about the effect of fire on Detroit's landscape and also the effect of blight on Detroit's landscapes as we were doing these interviews for for the firefighters. This past couple of years, we had a neighborhood advisory committee that was very interested in doing audio interviews of neighborhood elders. And so we figured out with them a series of interview questions where we could incorporate some of the responses into this history of the city. And many of those neighborhood elders were talking about the businesses that had been in black bottom that were then eliminated when the highways came through and their memories of being children and playing near there.
Carrie Morris (14:14):
But also some of those businesses that they mentioned were banking institutions, black banks, and some of the research that we did started to look at the establishment of the Freeman's bank and the trends in banking systems and use of those banking systems by people of color nationally. And I think one of the points of research we came up with was a lack of trust in the banking system and something like 30% of, of current families of color don't don't bank, because of that lack of trust currently now, and just thinking about that long history of wealth within this country and the systems that are making that wealth accessible and inaccessible to many people. It's another part that I think figures into this idea of property ownership of quality of life. And, and again, it's an issue that's not specific to this city, though. We can see the, on the ground physical effects of it here, but it's an issue that, that spreads widely does that It makes sense.
Ryan Myers-Johnson (15:24):
Yes, it makes perfect sense. There is a very strong thread of social justice, storytelling and advocacy and activism within your work. So I commend you and those are some amazingly complex and difficult topics that you're exploring in what are unique and accessible way to explore it through puppetry. And just to give the audience also a bigger picture of the type of puppetry that you're diving into. I think, you know, when we're looking at puppetry in American context, we often think about hand puppets or, you know, if we want to take another step forward, you know, thinking Jim Henson. But you you're drawing from sort of, of worldwide diaspora right, of different types of techniques. Yeah.
Carrie Morris (16:11):
Yeah. And thank you again for getting to kind of the nuts and bolts of some of the formal qualities that, that we use. I was introduced to puppetry by a puppeteer who, who now is based in LA named Janie Geiser, who is really great. And in terms of American puppetry she comes at puppetry from also a filmmaker's perspective after, after that was in as an undergrad in college. And as a graduate student, I then was able to study with an Indonesian artist. And I spent a couple of years in Indonesia working with and studying from Indonesian shadow puppeteers who are specifically if you have seen Indonesian shadow puppetry, is there very, very detailed shadow? Puppetry is deeply entrenched within day to day life and culture in Indonesia. Almost every president in the past, like century within Indonesia has likened themselves or been likened to a certain shadow puppet character from the candidate.
Carrie Morris (17:16):
It's, it's really, really interesting. Their puppets are, are very detailed and it's a whole trade. And it has a real cultural relevance. It's it's that, that that, that some, that I've, I don't, I can't think of any, any, any puppet form here that really we would have the same, it has the same impact. So it's a very special thing over there. And also the act of live performance within that puppet show is done by these puppeteers. And it's, it's kind of more like a baseball game then a then like a sit down 20 minute performance, like it'll start at eight. Everybody goes, it's open air people kind of talk through the scenes. They are it's they already know, but they watch the action scenes and you'll go get some food. Maybe you'll take a nap. The show will go from 8:00 PM to like 6:00 AM sometimes and have these huge epics from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.
Carrie Morris (18:08):
And it's this whole thing. So I spent a few years there really loving the deliberateness and the intensity and the craftsmanship of the form of those puppets and also the community based nature of how the storytellers would incorporate the audience into their story. And every small village that one of those puppeteers went to, they would spend time during the day talking to local people. And then that night they would incorporate some of the local gossip and stuff into the shows they were doing. So you have this thing with, you know, Rama and SITA, but then they're also working in like, you know, who didn't pay their tab at the fast food restaurant down the street, you know, like making fun. So so that is really so that's, that was my early sort of training for the firefighter project and the weight of air project specifically.
Carrie Morris (19:04):
We were able to bring in, I, my, my nonprofit, Carrie Morris arts productions we were able to bring in a puppet artist who is now based in Chicago but has spent a long time in New York named Tom Lee who is really, really skilled at a boon Raku style puppet form. Buena KU is a Japanese form usually multiple operators and it's known for being very, very gesturally resonance. So really realistic very realistic. It's usually three people on a puppet but can be used with two people or can be used with five people depending on the puppet and what you want it to do. And for me, trying to figure out at the stories that we're telling which form makes the most sense to employ in some scenes where we're talking about things that were in the past or some scenes that are specifically about elements of fire, sometimes shadow puppetry techniques may work best because of the ability to fade in and out of images.
Carrie Morris (20:10):
The ability to use light as an illumination source and the manipulation of that light. Both of those qualities are really great at speaking to memory and the idea of memory and light and heat sources. Whereas in some of the work with telling specifically the firefighter story, the idea of the engagement of the firefighters, physical bodies in these realities and what happens when gravity they're released from gravity that is something that the impact that the narrative impact and the visual impact, seeing a very realistic looking [inaudible] miniaturized firefighter running through space and then floating and trying to figure out how to get some connection to land or some anchor. That's, that's the best form that turns out to be the best form to tell that aspect of the story. So, so we plug in a lot of different forms and it's really the form is, is dependent on the the content, the function of the narrative that we're trying to tell
Ryan Myers-Johnson (21:22):
You have an incredible amount of resources. It seems at your disposal in terms of historical and cultural practices in regards to puppetry. And I love the idea that all of these different elements are coming together to tell these critically relevant stories in Detroit. And just in thinking about like your adapt to, you know, your ability to adapt as an artist and as an organizer see map has been Carrie Moore's arts production has continued its work despite the quarantine conditions that we're currently in with COVID-19. Can you talk a bit about how you were able to continue with your puppet slam art festival and how the situation, the situation of the pandemic has affected your art practice?
Carrie Morris (22:11):
Oh, man, I mean, I think, I think we're, I think all artists, we're all still figuring it out, you know, we're all still figuring it out. I feel so grateful that we have had the work that we have and that you know, that we, that we have our health and that yeah, I, I, what can I say about that? I feel like I'm still in the center of it. So I feel like nothing is figured out. I will say that we like everybody else spent the first few weeks trying to get our heads around what was going on, but also just making sure that the staff that we, that support what we do and the artists that we know we're all able to get online. So that meant sometimes getting equipment to people, getting hotspots to people figuring out how we could continue to employ artists that we know in our network and then try to expand some of that, those production stipends.
Carrie Morris (23:12):
We had planned to do a puppet slam in April. We plan that from the beginning of the year, and then when everything hit the fan, we said, okay, well, we have this production stipend money. We're going to so many people, so many artists we know have lost employment in one way or another. So we're going to get that out. So we usually ask between like five and seven artists to be in the puppet slam. And this year we asked 25 just as a way to get, to get some of that distributed. And also because I kinda knew that I mean, it's day to day, but sometimes we just don't have the bandwidth, you know, so I was like, well, we'll ask we'll ask all of these people. And I have a feeling that some people may not have capacity right now.
Carrie Morris (23:54):
And and we also wanted to make it really clear that these new works should just be what people made with things people have around their house. They shouldn't be like working on a Magnum Opus with multiple people and rehearsing and dangerous conditions. You know, we had to make that really clear because otherwise I think people would, sometimes it is really nice to delve into a new project when there's a bunch of stuff going on. So that, that was really that fo I was really inspired and like humbled and grateful for all of the artists that participated and for the amount of creativity and like drive that they all put in to getting those pieces together. And they were so beautiful. They just looked the puppets look great. The effects look like they just did such a great job. I'm going to share the YouTube link with you so you can watch it. And they can, if XD wants to post that on their page or something as part of this. Yeah.
Ryan Myers-Johnson (24:51):
Do you feel that the translation to an online production works particularly well for puppetry or what sort of challenges are we encountering? You know, it is still alive art form. It is. Yeah.
Carrie Morris (25:05):
The easiest way for us to transition it for that slam, because it was so fast based on our, me and my staff's knowledge of like live like zoom platforms and stuff like that. We asked all of the participating artists, what would be easiest for them if they would want to do a live performance or if they would want to do prerecorded and then send us the video. And then we would do a live hosting of those video casts. And most people agreed video prerecorded videos. So that's what we ended up doing. I think we did, I think in terms of getting creative content online for us with that slam, we did an okay job with that. I think now the learning curve for us is how to facilitate audience management, because there are also many people like myself.
Carrie Morris (25:59):
There are also many people in the audience who you know, we're all learning the zoom thing together. And, and, and then when zoom malfunctions, and some of it's like the mute all upon entry button doesn't work anymore, and there's 160 people on your internet, like [inaudible], and then also there's another 25 texting you or being like, Hey, I think you should. You know, and, and also, so it's a lot of it's a lot of audience management and it's also trying to figure out the platform that, that works for us. So that's our learning curve right now. And I think I know nationally we've been in conversation with the national puppet slam network and five or six different puppet slams all over the country. And they're all trying to figure out the same thing. So for producers and curators, I think that the transition is that for us that's the next step is like audience management.
Carrie Morris (26:52):
And then, you know, the other project that we are again, really grateful to be working on is this collaboration with the Detroit zoo. And so we were commissioned in late 2019 to work with zoo staff on a series of all ages, puppet shows about some of their the animals in their care. And those shows will premiere on the zoo's phase, Facebook channel, Facebook page, I think Saturday, June 6th is the first one all the way through the end of August. So that has been really great, but it's also, we have learned a lot about this idea of like the webcam, if that's your kind of performance portal in a live audience, you've got all these people sitting and there's this energy. And they may be able to, you know, see this person's knees over here. They may be able to see like what's off stage over there, but when we're doing these live performances, everything along the edges of my camera is onstage. And then it's not.
Carrie Morris (27:53):
So this idea of like entry, like where's our entry and where's our exits his live performers. And also the idea of scale I'm as I'm like doing this, I'm talking through with Ryan on this video chat that we're on and I'm putting my hand really close to my camera. And if it says something on my hand like, Oh, this is really close. And then you pull it way far away and it's really big. So there's all these technological things to play with. And I think Tori Ashford is our performer for the first Sue's show. And we're in rehearsals with her right now. And we're approaching those technological components as just another like creative tool to work with in our show.
Ryan Myers-Johnson (28:31):
Wow. I love this conversation around creating your new theater space within a digital space. You know, we've been having a lot of conversations with artists and obviously I'm also online and seeing, you know, we've got to get back to normal, we've got to get back together, but what an interesting technical and creative challenge to kind of reimagine the online digital space as a, as a new platform or a new theater for you to engage with audiences.
Ryan Myers-Johnson (29:00):
So this has been quite a massive conversation, and I think that we could spend, we could spend hours just going back to puppetry and firefighters. And so I just commend you for the vastness of your work and for the issues that you are tackling, especially in this time of great change for the city of Detroit. So with that, I'm Ryan Myers-Johnson. Thank you for having this conversation with us coming at you from Detroit, MI.
New Speaker (29:37):
Thank you again so much to Ryan and to AXD and I am coming to you also from Detroit, MI.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
Thank you for listening. AXD Living X podcast is a production of ruder tune and made possible with support from the Kresge foundation mixed and edited by Red Carpet Lounge. Music for the series is by Pamela Wise, to find out more about the projects and artists visit artxdetroit.com. Download the companion Living X catalog featuring all 22 commissioned works.