Madeleine St. Romain & Priscilla Smith

Why make ourselves a house to haunt?

We need to enclose space because some of the media we have chosen -- video, overhead projector, slide, and shadow work -- all require darkness. Building forts with your siblings as a child, as we both did, evolves readily into making installations and performances. Children are often reminded that they do not own or control where they live. Building forts is a way to assert ownership of a particular physical place. We claim a space, inviting people in to a particularized part of The Dalton Gallery.

Ghost House began because we wanted to collaborate differently. Our work together has been character, idea and atmosphere driven. We haven't done much together with plot. We both have a repertoire of supernatural performance pieces we can utilize to give us an anchor for our improvisation. For us, one of the most important parts of Ghost House is to stimulate new collaboratively developed work.

Puppetry uses different performance muscles from acting, though many of the same technical skills come into play. Actors train to express themselves with their bodies. Puppeteers express themselves through their puppets. Building puppets to tell stories that we already know gives us components to create new stories.

When you ask people into a small dark place, it's difficult not to tell ghost stories.

Ghost stories are often a way of giving story to a place, of saying that there's more going on here than daily life. Summer camp ghosts, campus ghosts, the spooky house over on Comestock all say that we have more to us than our bodies, even if the apparent goal of that "more" is to creep up behind a person and make them jump.

We will haunt our house. We hope to tell a good story.

Ghost House Project
2006
Mixed media
Site specific installation, performance with puppets