Faun Fables interview
The following is an excerpt from an email interview with Dawn in April 2002.
bzzt: What things have you and Nils done with the Bay area theatre inkBoat?
Dawn McCarthy: Nils has done more with inkBoat and its director, Shinichi Iova-Koga, than I. Their collaboration goes back to 1995 when Shinichi began working with Nils’ group Idiot Flesh, improvising on pool tables at live shows. Nils does vocalizing- abstract and actual songs- for inkBoat, and has been a dancer in the cast, and makes music/sounds for live shows. I’ve done bits of each. A lot of the format is improv around a basic theme- one funny skit happened when inkBoat was booked on a warm Sunday afternoon outside a Border’s Bookstore amidst other more traditional dance acts. There was only three of them. I wasn’t there, but Nils came home afterwards with a Geisha-like wig on, and a form fitting white tea party dress. He’d played some kind of strange mom talking gibberish, while Shinichi was a dad type and they unrolled a rug they carried that contained Carla Kihlstedt as the baby. Wish I could’ve seen that one. In 1999, we joined inkBoat on an international Butoh festival in Berlin with a dozen other companies and 60 students from many countries partaking in these collage pieces we set up around a large castle farm near Berlin (dances were set up around the streams and barn and everywhere), and in an open warehouse space in Poland where the audiences stood and inch from your face very heartily reacting to your skit. Nils and I were amongst only a handful of musicians that were hired to run around the set and accompany the various groups throughout- it was quite busy and eccentric.