(bright upbeat music) (bright music) - Old materials get new life in the assemblages of sculptor Mary Pat Wager, chat with American Physical Theater founder Arthur Yorinks- ♪ Staring into the void ♪ - [Narrator] And catch a performance from Buggy Jive.

It's all ahead on this episode of "AHA!"

♪ Staring into the void ♪ - [Announcer] Funding for "AHA!"

has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include the Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chad and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, and The Robison Family Foundation.

(bright upbeat music) (bright upbeat music fades) (screen whooshes) (upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Matt Rogowicz and this is "AHA!

A House for Arts," a place for all things creative.

You know, it's not often that I'm blown away by a creative studio space, but when I first stepped into Mary Pat Wager's studio in East Greenbush, New York, my jaw dropped.

It was stunning.

There were piles and piles of metal and wood.

It was almost like walking through a museum of old relics, but then peppered throughout this organized chaos were her amazing sculptures on the walls and standing on the grounds.

You have to see it for yourself.

(bright gentle music) - Think about being in an old abandoned barn, and there are all these remaining farm equipment and agricultural implements and you love old boxes, and usually, there's a lot of those.

Maybe you can imagine being in a junkyard, an industrial junkyard where there's former pieces, like gears and unusual precut steel pieces that you can pick and choose from.

And you like the shape of them.

You like the color.

The patina is just amazing.

It's like picking your vocabulary with these objects because immediately, you have a connection to its shape or its form, its color.

You've seen it before.

It recalls a memory, and you know, you want to do some welding, so.

(bright gentle music) (button clicks) (welding torch hissing) My particular type of welding would be considered assemblage, where you pick and choose and just like a writer would choose words.

(bright gentle music) Back when I was a kid, I lived near a lake and had a horse, and I would ride my horse around the lake and through paths, picking up natural items that I though were just fascinating.

And then I corralled a section of the lake with wood, and after a couple of years, they were nicely smooth.

And so I began to combine natural items as a kid.

Loved it.

Always had a love of antiques and old things and intrigued by tools and objects that had a former life.

When I first learned how to weld, that was it.

I was in love with it.

It just felt like magic.

You know, me, this little person, able to weld chunks of steel together to say what I wanted to say.

(bright gentle music) The "Totem" series is one such series that are kind of cohesive in that they all have gas cylinders that I've used in various parts of it, but those gas cylinders act to unify the piece.

(metal clangs) And as I created them, they were creating themselves.

They became like a family unit.

(metal clanks) I have another one in the studio room of my great aunt Anna, whom I met when she was in her 80s and confined to bed.

And she used to do the needle point work of tatting, and her hands were all crippled up when I met her.

My grandmother was taking care of her.

And so at the time, I did sketches, and then I was doing bronze casting and made a bronze mask of her face, and then added other steel components, and it began to tell the story of my great aunt Anna, a prisoner of her own body with bars in front of the piece and her just staring off into space, wondering what's next, you know?

(bright gentle music) (metal clangs) I allow the materials oftentimes to dictate what I'm gonna say.

Let's take that big piece over there, right?

It's called "Essence."

And my mother was a quilt maker.

This inspired me when I began putting those pieces together that it looks very religious, nothing specific, but you get the feeling of that, and you see multiple squares and multiple ideas.

The center section has these pieces of farm equipment called seeders.

It's the tail end where it digs into the ground and drops seeds.

You know, we all need food.

It became more of a universal symbol of that.

And of course, the beautiful spill.

That stainless steel, irregular, organic-looking, frozen metal became like the religious icon, and the rays spreading out all over the rest of the landscape.

(bright gentle music) (crickets chirping) The basement is more like my private little space, where I can work any time of the day or night, and that houses a lot of smaller pieces of steel, wood, you name it.

(bright gentle music) I put myself through college working for a picture framing company, and from that, I started framing up a lot of my works, isolating them so there was no way the viewer could look away, and it focused in on just what was inside the frame.

(bright gentle music) I just get such a thrill out of it.

It fulfills an intense desire to make something, to create something, to put something in the world that's never been seen before.

(bright gentle music) - Arthur Yorinks has had a wide-ranging career.

He's worked in opera, theater, dance, film, radio, and is the author of over 40 acclaimed books.

Jade Warrick spoke with Arthur to learn about his latest endeavor, American Physical Theater, which he founded in 2024.

- Hey, Arthur.

How you doing today?

- Hey.

- Good to see you, Jade.

- I know you've worked in like, radio, you've written, you've done theater work, and you've done a lot more than that too.

That's just, like, me just barely going over your resume.

- (laughing) Yeah.

- So how does that have a lot of crossover?

How do you get there?

Like, what's the crossover with that?

- Yeah, you know, without disparaging my dear departed parents, I was the youngest of three, and I was raised sort of, like, benign neglect.

And what I mean by that is that they were so busy taking care of two adolescent teenagers.

they sort of, "Oh, there's a third kid," you know?

And so I was able to absorb and get into a lot of different arts, which I gravitated towards, from music and books and film.

And it was always, I have a hard time saying no to projects.

So I'm basically a storyteller, and the specific medium is not really that important to me.

It's about being able to tell a story.

- What about themes?

Are all your themes the same with any, or do you play around a little bit differently in each one?

- Well, you know, in books, I have a long, long, long trail of books for kids.

The overarching theme for that is basically what it means to be yourself and that you should revel in whoever you are.

So that's been not every single book 'cause I've done dozens of books, but that's a kind of overarching theme.

And in the theater, it's all over the map (Jade laughs) mostly because I've adapted a lot of works, pieces of literature for radio or audio drama or pieces of literature for opera.

You know, so adaptations are part of it.

So it's somebody else's theme in a way.

But the original stuff, it runs the gamut.

- I love that.

You know, do whatever you feel like it when you feel like it.

- Yeah, yeah.

- So let's talk about the American Physical Theater.

- Sure.

- If somebody was walking into the American Physical Theater show, what do they expect?

How is it different?

What's physical theater?

- What you would see are actors there mostly, it's an acting medium, who are coming together to tell a story, whether it's a slightly abstract or narrative, but not with words primarily, primarily with the use of what they do physically.

And it's not dance per se.

We're not choreographing movement for the sake of movement, but what we're doing is pushing along the narrative without saying anything.

It's a little bit like a silent movie.

We also throw in, if you're coming to one of our performances, we use projection mostly as backdrops.

We have minimal sets, sometimes none, but it could be a chair.

It could be a bunch of chairs.

The last play we did was called "The Lifeboat."

It's a little wooden slice of a boat, you know, just sort of sliced in half, so you could see the people in it.

There's music often.

Most of our work is so-called scored, almost like a film, with various pieces of music.

But again, nobody is moving to the music.

It is literally like a film score to just enhance or compliment or play with the drama that's happening in front of you.

It's kind of unique actually.

- Yeah, I'll say.

It sounds very unique.

I don't think many people have probably been to a physical theater.

This could be a nice new experience for people to understand this type of art form at a whole new perspective.

- You know, anecdotally, our audience members, if there's any particular response, and I say this in the positive way, that often the response is, "I've never seen anything like this," in a good way.

- I was gonna say, which is good.

You know, it's good to do something new.

- "Oh my God, I haven't seen anything like this."

- [Jade] Yeah, it would be.

- You know, it's not like we're reinventing the wheel here, but it is so-called a theatrical meal, but what the ingredients are and how we put them together is sort of our unique thing.

- Yeah, and I know, you know, you have a heavy background as a writer, so you kind of briefly spoke about it at the beginning.

So has this come with challenges going to a more, like, physical, you know, performance?

- You know, I've had a very eclectic, crazy journey of life in the arts, Jade.

And what, we call it APT, or American Physical Theater does for me creatively is it's sort of the first time where all of the things that I've been involved with over my life, like music, like writing, like theater, whatever it is, is all sort of wrapped into one spot.

It's fun for me.

And when I first came into the theater world when I was really young, I came across a little tiny theater company who the director of which was trying to put together acting and movement.

So that kernel has stuck with me for decades, and this is now the sort of blossoming of that notion.

- So let's talk about your newest play, a production called "And Then..." - Yeah.

- And I know it is about the relationship between two people, so without giving any spoilers, you know, give us, like, what were you exploring in this play of yours?

- It is a bit of a kaleidoscope.

I can tell you the opening of the play, which will then say, "What is he talking about?"

But if you can imagine four gigantic heads, sort of like if you reference those on Easter Island, those gigantic- - Mm-hmm.

- Okay.

And the play opens with just that image of those heads.

It's not projected.

They're actually built.

And out of the eyes, ears, mouth crawl out the company, the performers.

- Oh, that's cool.

(laughs) - You know?

- We try to place various interesting elements in a certain order, which evokes a narrative.

So the idea of this is not the beginning of time, but it evolves where these performers sort of form two clumps, so to speak, and they open up, and out of their opening come the two protagonists, and we explore the relationship between these two people over time.

- Yeah.

Sounds awesome.

I may have to see it.

You got me sold at just a giant statue head with people crawling out.

- Yeah, yeah, the heads, yeah.

- Like, what is that going to look like?

- We haven't built them yet, so I hope they're still in, - That's going to be so cool.

- Okay.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's the idea.

- What other plays do you have coming up?

- Most of the plays we do, as I mentioned, are full length evening plays.

We're attempting to do a couple of shorter works.

One incredible devoted associate artistic director, his name is Hassiem Muhammad, wonderful guy, and he's working on for us a brief piece that's kind of based on the Firebird theme.

And it's about people in nature, and it's kind of topical actually.

And then I want to get into a little bit of, as I mentioned, the adaptation world that's been a sort of forte of mine in other mediums.

There's a wonderful book, rather obscure, which was a prequel to "Jane Eyre," the Charlotte Bronte.

So Rochester is the name of the main character.

Jane comes to him to be sort of a nanny for him.

I'm really simplifying this, but it turns out that he has a maniacal, crazy wife locked up in a room in his mansion.

And the prequel of the book, which was written by a British woman named Jean Rhys, the book is called "Wide Sargasso Sea," and it's all about the origin of that wife, who turns into basically a nutcase, so to speak.

(Jade laughs) But it's her trajectory.

And I'm really interested in seeing if we can tell or at least reference that story without language.

- Speaking really, right?

- Yeah.

- That would be very interesting, especially how to get, like, the maniacalness.

- Yeah.

- It's very, like, physical.

(laughs) - There you go.

- A very physical attribute.

Well, thank you again, Arthur, for visiting us today and talking about all things American Physical Theater and all the cool things you have coming up.

And I can't wait to check it out myself.

- Yeah, thank you, Jade.

It's a real pleasure.

- Yeah, it's great having you.

- Same.

- Thank you.

- Please welcome Buggy Jive.

(energetic upbeat guitar music) (energetic upbeat guitar music continues) ♪ Some of these people ♪ ♪ Ruin it for the rest of us ♪ ♪ Some of these people ♪ ♪ They be testing the best of us ♪ ♪ You got to learn to ignore them fools ♪ ♪ Can't let their ignorance get you down ♪ ♪ You got to play by your own rules ♪ ♪ Or else these fools are gonna win ♪ ♪ Some of these humans know how to aggravate ♪ ♪ So-called humans ♪ ♪ Make a brother wanna activate ♪ ♪ Oh ♪ ♪ You got to learn to ignore them fools ♪ ♪ Can't let their ignorance get you down ♪ ♪ You got to play by your own rules ♪ ♪ Or else these fools are gonna win ♪ (energetic upbeat music) ♪ Accept what I can't change ♪ ♪ I try to change the things I can ♪ ♪ I try to accept what I can't change ♪ ♪ I try to change the things I can ♪ ♪ But it's hard to know the difference ♪ ♪ It's hard to know the difference ♪ ♪ It's hard ♪ (energetic upbeat music) ♪ You try to stay cool ♪ ♪ You try to retreat ♪ ♪ But some of these fools ♪ ♪ They need to have their asses beat ♪ ♪ Sometimes you cannot ignore them fools ♪ ♪ Sometimes you just got to take 'em down ♪ ♪ Sometimes you just got to break the rules ♪ ♪ Or else these fools are gonna win ♪ ♪ Sometimes you cannot ignore these fools ♪ ♪ Sometimes you just got to break it down ♪ ♪ Some stuff should be met with attitude ♪ ♪ Some fools inspire your behind to move ♪ ♪ Sometimes these fools is gonna need to be schooled ♪ ♪ So school these fools with all of your negritude ♪ ♪ Or else these fools just might win ♪ (energetic upbeat music) ♪ But it's hard to know the difference ♪ (gentle upbeat music) ♪ She's standing still on the dance floor ♪ ♪ 'Cause she ain't never been this high before ♪ ♪ She wanna slip out the back door ♪ ♪ But she cannot move ♪ ♪ She wanna party ♪ ♪ While the world burns ♪ (gentle upbeat music) ♪ She was all ready for the line dance ♪ ♪ She was just about to shake it in her hot pants ♪ ♪ To another fake country song with a hip hop beat ♪ ♪ But she can not move her feet ♪ ♪ She wanna party ♪ ♪ While the world burns ♪ ♪ She wanna party ♪ ♪ While the world burns ♪ ♪ Sometimes you wanna escape the world with a little thrill ♪ ♪ But the world catches up to you in a little pill ♪ ♪ And the world sets off tiny explosions ♪ ♪ In the center of your mind ♪ ♪ To remind you ♪ ♪ There is no escape from time ♪ (gentle upbeat music) ♪ She wanna party ♪ ♪ While the world burns ♪ ♪ She wanna party ♪ ♪ While the world burns ♪ ♪ She ain't never been this high before ♪ ♪ Now she's just a silly metaphor ♪ ♪ Out of a nightmare and into a bad dream ♪ ♪ She can't even move her lips to scream ♪ (gentle upbeat music) ♪ She hears voices ♪ ♪ She is staring into the void ♪ ♪ She is staring into the void ♪ ♪ She is staring into the void ♪ ♪ She is staring into the void ♪ ♪ She is staring into the void ♪ ♪ She is staring into the void ♪ ♪ She is staring into the void ♪ ♪ She is staring into the void ♪ ♪ She is staring into the void ♪ ♪ She is staring into the void ♪ ♪ She is staring into the void ♪ ♪ Her sense of self is destroyed ♪ ♪ She is staring into the void ♪ ♪ She is staring into the void ♪ ♪ Her sense of self is destroyed ♪ ♪ She is staring into the void ♪ ♪ Her sense of self is destroyed ♪ ♪ She is staring into the void ♪ ♪ She is staring into the void ♪ (bright music) - Thanks for joining us.

For more arts, visit wmht.org/aha and be sure to connect with us on social.

I'm Matt Rogowicz.

Thanks for watching.

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music fades) - [Narrator] Funding for "AHA!"

has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include The Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, and The Robison Family Foundation.