Set and Props

Before I do a show review with all the Jell-O Art, I want to honor all the work I did on the set, props and conveying the narrative through visual cues, to extend all that fun for the future. 

Maybe it looks better with the actors in front of it, and it isn't placed as I had envisioned it, but there are a couple of parts I really liked. We wanted to be in space, in two very different parts of it, with styles to coordinate with who we were. On one side we had what we called the Golds, whose ship was made of cardboard and had gold and logos all over it, plus a little graffiti. Their background, which was supposed to be right behind them, was covered with gold embellishment like the Oval Office now is. I really liked their ship. I wrote graffiti on it on stage, and thought about letting people have at it, but i was afraid someone would put a swastika on it and ruin the video. My original plan to have an eagle for a figurehead seemed insulting to eagles. I thought turkeys wouldn't care.

The Pirates, which we changed to Space Buccaneers for a less felonius image, were all about natural materials, with a DIY look as if they had escaped to space early on in the ruin of earth, and built themselves a paradise where they made Jell-O to sell to other space refugees. I made their ship first, out of sticks I had pruned off my apple tree. It was supposed to be closer to the front of the stage as well, but to accommodate the tumbling mat everything had to be moved to the back wall. Not what I had planned, but I can be flexible. I had ideas for sails that also had to be jettisoned, suspended on bamboo poles, which were way too long for the space. The figurehead for that ship was a lot more elegant in my imagination but oh well. I am used to that happening as it has since I was little. What I see in my head is usually beyond my capability to put it on paper. It looked DIY I guess...

I had a lot of fun making the stick structure. It was nice weather and I did it on the deck way early in the process. The sign didn't get made until the day before the show. There were probably too many pirate props but they needed something to do between songs. It will be interesting to see the video and see if they actually did pirate stuff. I woke up in the middle of the night Friday night and hated the background for the pirates, so went in Saturday and put up the colorful bandanas and that seemed better. 

All in all, it was relatively simple, with lights added by various people and some nice work with lighting and backdrop by TJ. Hopefully next year we won't have to squeeze in  a tumbling mat. The talented girls were a hit with the audience but it was pretty overwhelming trying to get that to work with all of us humans on stage trying to be at the mics to sing and deliver our lines.

We did pretty well but a week's more of practice would have helped. Lines were delivered out of sequence, dropped altogether, or needed prompting. Song starts were sometimes rough. We don't all sing that well sometimes...it's not great. Our crowd is sweet and loves us but it could have been smoother. And I forgot to get the band on stage before my speech and forgot to tell them they would have to play something while I got changed. They managed, though. Everybody did pretty well for a bunch of amateurs. And I get to have a pirate ship on my deck for a year or two. I'll probably grow beans on it or something. 

Just Desserts

 I decided to post this in both of my blogs, this one and my personal one, Divine Tension. I figured my readers of each might as well know both aspects of me, which really aren't separate, of course.

 Hello, it's me. I can't sleep. I noticed, when I got up after trying to sleep for a few hours, that the lights are on in my neighbor's house, as well. I imagine there are many who cannot sleep and this isn't something new, of course. But it is dark out in the world, much darker than I, for one, am used to.

I'm not naive. I've been a radical thinker from an early age, and I pay attention. I care about justice. I care about things that are life-affirming, both concrete and abstract things, and these are some times when it is impossible to rest easy. I knew the future would not be pretty, but I did fail to prepare for how fast and how hard it would come down on us.

I have this little thing I do, that I've done for almost 40 years, called the Jell-O Art Show. I write about it in my other blog, Gelatinaceae, which gets a lot more readers than this one does, because it is about art, and joy. Jell-O Art is a particularly joyful art form, silly, beautiful, awkward, glorious, and many times, jiggly and slippery and super uncooperative. It's the reason I call myself an artist, when in my profession I am a crafter, a production worker, a screenprinter and not all that skilled of one, despite doing it for my whole working life. I'm self-taught, so I'm just a worker. I like work and I am diligent, and I've done well with it in a limited and sustainable way.

But Jell-O Art is different. Producing and being in the Jell-O Art show engages all of me. Over the years I learned how to be an artist, how to imagine and conceptualize, how to find the deeper levels, how to put my whole self in and shake myself about. Every year I spend the three winter months of January through March working more or less full time on the Jell-O Art Show. Not only do I work out some kind of personal piece, which is an expression of something about my life or self, but I have been lucky enough to work with a very dear group of people called the Radar Angels. 

The individual Angels have come and go, and while there are still a few of us from the beginning in the late 70s and early 80s, it's an ever-changing group. We work in a process that is purely collaborative, with everyone pooling their talents to make something out of what we all bring. We brainstorm for a few weeks about what we want our show to be about. We throw out tons of ideas, and gradually we coalesce into something we all agree we want to say, using parody songs and a type of melodrama that is generally only a little bit serious. 

You can go to my other blog for about 15 or so years of what that has been about. In 2012 I was crowned as the Queen of Jell-O Art in recognition of how seriously I take Jell-O, and how important it is to me, and that just fueled this deeper appreciation I have for it and brought me into the role of bringing that passion and creative force to the public in the form of the show.

Now I generally write the bones of the script, which we develop together, and we choose the songs to fit and write our lines and pick our characters and figure out our costumes and I make a lot of the props and set pieces and we all work for the last few weeks to pull it all together to present it. This Saturday is when we will be doing it. 

Because these times have been so dark, and we are all of a mind about them, we did something we have always made ourselves avoid for the most part: we got political. We had to. Three of us even decided to play a few of the current archvillains of our times. We chose three out of the many, many that we could have chosen, and for each of us, it is not easy to do. We don't want to come on stage as racists, nazis, psychopaths and evil men. We don't even want to play men! This year in a weird twist, all of our actors are women, and all of our characters are men. At least they start out as men.

One of the themes we wanted to work on was gender...we wanted to explore honoring multiple genders and the fluidity of them, to have a world where that was open for people to be free about it, and make our statement of acceptance of it, but as the show developed we kind of stopped thinking about it. We just acted like people...as if gender didn't even exist. It just occurred to me tonight that we did that. It's a metaphor really, that if there was that openness (WHICH THERE IS!) everyone would live like that.

So that's operating. And in coming on stage, generally, we Angels feel loved. Our audience is the best. They always approve of whatever we do, our mostly amateur singing and presentation, our ridiculous costumes, our dumb jokes and sometimes stale humor. Our obvious theme is always Jell-O saves the world, no matter how much we try to say something else. It just comes out like that. 

But this time, Jell-O is a very weak weapon against the world. We are coming on stage to be hated, the three of us who are playing the billionaires. Really hated. We hate ourselves even. Yet we will sing and dance and pretend at the end that we are transformed and we hope to leave the audience feeling loved and ourselves, at least as the people we really are, back to feeling loved.

There is not any hope that the characters will be loved, no matter how much they are transformed, because no, they will not get what they deserve, they will not be stopped or even aware of our little play and our sad and profound comedy. We will have our little moments of joy, our escape, but it will not be fully satisfying when we walk off the stage and back into the dark world we are living through.

That's life I suppose. As an old person, when I look back at the brief times when things were going well and the culture was opening and affirming, it was never that for everyone. Black people were still being killed by the police and racists, different people of all kinds were still being othered, poor people were still being starved and caused to suffer and being deprived of their humanity. It has never been a pretty world, except of course for the birds and trees and flowing waters and incredible kindnesses and soft hearts and all that everyone attempts to create and hold sacred for themselves and each other.

It's enough to keep you up late every night, isn't it? It's enough to make you dissolve in wonder for your whole life, and then when you get old, like I have, it's enough to make you weep for the wasted moments and lost opportunities and very short time left to have some more. 

This is my late night Jell-O Art world, friends. Maybe I can sleep now. Maybe I have had enough, for now. I am pretty sure the light will come back in the morning so I can work some more. I will never lose hope.

T Shirts! And basics

 I know some of you are struggling with your jiggly creating, so I will remind you of a couple of things. When you are doing the wet Jell-O, you can still get jiggle with a stiffer formula, like the jiggler recipe on the Jell-O box, which says to use 2 1/2 cups of water to 2 6oz packages of Jell-O, instead of the 4 cups of water for one 6 oz package. So that is roughly one fourth of the water. You still get a little jiggle and a firm enough piece to cut it or get it out of the molds with not much trouble. You can decrease the water even more to get a more firm body, so that it won't melt at room temperature and will set up fast. You can use hot water with the Jell-O brand, as it is mostly chemicals and sugar and not very much gelatin.

If you are using the Knox brand, those little envelopes hold 1/4 oz of gelatin which they want you to put in one cup of water. That means for a substantial amount you have to use a lot of the envelopes, and you will want to use more than that amount of gelatin to get more body. Since it is only gelatin, you should use cold water, let it sit for a few minutes, and then melt it in a microwave or pan on the stove.

For the dried gelatin I make, I use 3 oz gelatin per cup of water, so you can go anywhere up to that (I suppose more if you want) and it will harden up at room temp, and stay somewhat stable. Refrigerate it if you want it to not get moldy, because if you don't dry it, it will only last a couple of days in its wet state.

One of the best tips is that if you don't like what you get, you can just remelt it in a pan or bowl or jar, and try again. You can add more gelatin or try a different type of mold, or technique. One thing I do a lot is just swirl it around in the container to coat the sides inside, instead of making a solid chunk. You can't always do that, but it saves a lot of gelatin if you can, and that stuff is getting expensive. 

 Remember it is supposed to be fun! And you can use lots of things for molds, but the easiest kinds to get the Jell-O out of are flexible plastic. You can use blister packs, ice cube trays, candy molds, lots of things you might have around or find at a thrift store. My first step used to be going to the thrift store for inspirational objects. Just see what appeals to you.

You still have plenty of time to try some things out. Keep in mind that anything you do will be perfect. There is no critical structure in the Jell-O Art world, no judges, no "best" or "worst." There is only Jell-O Art.  Let it feed you and bring you joy.

Got the shirts done this week, well, almost done, as I decided to color in the little Jell-O and made way too many shirts. I ran through my gold marker and now have to use screenprint ink to paint the rest with a brush. Very time consuming but they're almost finished. 

The colors are maroon or brown, pretty dark. It's a dark time. I also had some brown shirts I needed to use up that I bought in 2021 and dyed. That's one reason I made too many. 

Hope to see you all there! I do think we will have a good time. Maybe it won't be as cold and wet as it is today, either. I sure don't want to go out in this.

Springing Forward Out of Chaos

 It was postering week as I went around downtown finding places for our Jell-O Art Show poster, which we produce and distribute ourselves. It's not easy to find places for posters anymore, and I doubt many people spend time reading bulletin boards, with all of our information now found online in more silo-ed locations. But we like art in all forms and we love our posters. The artist, Brian Hahn, has made the last five or so. We didn't do one in 2020, and I remember doing the Jell-O Goes Gold, which was 2018 if I remember right. His are excellent and professional and we love them.

 When the sun is out I like to be outside so yesterday I took things out on the deck and worked on the bigger set pieces that I don't have room for inside. I started that, anyway, but soon sat down and started putting all of my ideas on paper, which turned out to be four pages of notes on all of the projects I'm doing. I do most of the work on the script, sets, props, and of course t-shirts, my costumes, and a piece or two of my own, so I had a lot of details swirling around in my brain and it was really fun for me to see the amount of creativity I am involved in right now. 

In a way it was procrastinating and enjoying the spring day but I feel good about it. I even took photos which look like an extremely manic scattering of what many people would call junk and crap. I'm attempting to not buy anything this year, except I will have to buy t-shirts, but I needs to use up at materials and I probably do have everything I need. Most of it is the ethereal and ephemeral ideas I am generating and collating from the other creative people in our troupe. 

We have so much fun working out our lines, songs and jokes, physical and literary. We know the audience won't get them all. The first rule is to amuse ourselves, and then to share it, but one thing I remembered yesterday is how Art Saves Lives.

There's no getting away from politics right now as our whole world seems to be hijacked by lunatics and psychopaths, with a gazillion good people desperately trying to keep up with it and stop as much as we can. As my defense against the cognitive dissonance I have fully immersed in Jell-O land as I generally do to keep down my anxiety about getting it all done by showtime. We only have two more weeks!!

Fortunately it is all progressing rather well though we realize we are risking offending people with our show this year. I decided to give a little trigger warning in my opening speech, as it will be apparent by our set pieces that we are inviting some super villains. We hope it will be funny and the comic relief we all need, but there is always a chance the timing will be off...some last minute horror could happen that would turn us all to jelly and scare us from making the bold statements we intend to make. I am hoping if that does happen we will pivot and quickly write an epilogue or some way to communicate our real messages to our audience, which is our art and appreciator community here in our region and town. I hope you will come to the show and take the journey with us...we are going to space, if you need a hint. 

For my own piece, as well as the t-shirt design, as I made notes I recognized that I am compelled to channel my radical self. I was transformed at age 19 when I changed schools to American University in Washington DC, where there was a lot more happening than in my freshman year at Purdue. I went to see a film, the 1966 The War Game, about a nuclear holocaust in Britain. It's a fake documentary that cuts. I remember the repeating of "It's perfectly safe" and I dropped in horror into the new reality that governments lie...and I had grown up believing a lot of things that I'd been told. It was 1969, not long after the JFK assassination, and all the others that piled on after, and of course I had crouched under my desk at school many times as a kid. It all added up to me having an instant radicalization, which I never "came back" from.  

I became a hippie, war protestor, and student of politics, and couldn't have been in a better place, or more lucky about who came into my sphere of interest. The next few decades were wild. I moved here to Eugene in 1976 and we had a thriving alternative community so I found a home that worked for me and have been able to just inhabit my revolutionary self. I still practice voluntary simplicity, eat organic, try to be a vegan, and so many things I began at that time. It has been a rich life. 

Which is all to say I have to do something radical with my Jell-O Art. I haven't settled on it yet. I'm hoping as I finish more of the little projects an idea will flash into my visual brain, as I can usually depend on that. It only took about 5 minutes of brainstorming one morning in my journal to come up with a terrific t-shirt idea. You will definitely want one this year, so bring that $10 (maybe I will charge $15, as of course shirt prices are up a bit and I should make a little money I suppose.) I will still have all the old ones for $5, what's left of them.

Checked the weather and it is going to rain Sunday night, so I have to get outside and paint set pieces while I can now. I'll upload yesterday's photos and see if there are any I can post that won't tell all my manic secrets. I know, you all thought I was just a normal, dull old lady, didn't you. Well, some days I am assuredly not.

Can't give away too much about the show...but when you know, you will know.

 

Sliming Along

 It's all Jell-O all the time around here, though I have no idea what I am doing as a piece this year. I made a few flowers and some Slugs-on-Sticks to sell, since people always want to take home something and I am not making many of the fascinators anymore. I have previous years' pieces to bring, which I will, but I still have to make something new. Lots of other things are working around in my brain.

 The script is fun and pretty firmed up, so we have to learn and sing the songs over and over and try to get that done. Not many weeks left until March 22! We spent like an hour just working out how to sing one tiny short song which was a little ambitious for our troupe. We managed. Also, it is a forgiving audience so if we don't sound great, no one complains too loudly. We didn't really manage to channel Taylor Swift that well last year...those stars are popular for a reason, and it's not just the clothes.

Costumes are a very fun part and I have been working on mine, shuffling through my vast quantities of thrifting finds and ridiculous accessories I have held onto for just the one moment when they will be perfect. I don't want to spend any money this year if possible, supporting the boycotting to take down the oligarchy and all, but I might have to get a thing or two. 

Doing everything simultaneously is fun for me, lets my mind roll around being its weirdest with no consequences. By the time the show comes many ideas have been discarded for better ones or simplicity and I can trust that. If I go too far off people start telling me what to do and not do and I like to avoid that so I project their attitudes into my head sometimes to limit myself. One limit is how much I can fit in my car, because I have to get it all there and get it home. A ton of work goes into the three-hour show. 

If you are curious about how to make the flowers, it is a lot like making flowers from paper, folding and curling the gelatin into floral shapes. You have to get the dried gelatin to act like paper, which is tricky. I usually brush water onto the parts I want to bend, both sides, and wait a little for it to soften up so I can shape it without breaking it. Then I put it on a stick, glueing it with the molten gelatin, and glue a leaf on there too. I don't get too figurative with the flowers, just try to please my eye and make something fairly graceful. I layer up a few pieces, maybe a rolled on in the center or a few pieces of something of another color to look like stamens, or just an unusual concoction not necessarily found in nature.

One of the important things to do with Jell-O art is let it do what it wants. It isn't that cooperative about meeting your vision, and the dried stuff distorts itself as it dries, which I just work around. I have made things that looked ugly and I just take them apart and do something else. 

 Most of it does not photograph very well, and I should have waited for better light on these, but I'm trying to be productive today and stop doom scrolling, and there's no sun. Sunlight really does nice things to the flowers, shining through them onto the background and all. I'll look through some old ones and see if I can find better illustrations of how you might want to do it. Or just, like all things Jell-O, roll up your sleeves and get to it.

I noticed that at the Kiva they do have plain gelatin but a one-pound box is $21.00! I have gotten it for about $10 a pound in bulk but everything has gone up, so you might just have to treat it like the fine art material it wants to be. I expect the Jell-O brand is still cheap, and will go on sale for Easter, so if you want to make some Tacky Food, look for that. 

Here's a video of 2023, just to get you in some kind of a mood. YouTube There's No Bizness Like Jell-O Bizness

Sets and Props and Scripts, Oh My!

 I've gotten into far left field working on the script, sets and props for the performance, which is coming together well for a change. We like to keep it secret for maximum fun for the audience, so I'll be vague, but I just wanted to report how much fun it is.

Here's the set from last year. I had to promise everyone I would simplify greatly and I am trying, but I love making these things and it is so far from my usual art experience of production screenprinting that I'm loving the opportunity to let loose. This view is just one of several as we went through several "rooms" of this Mystery Dungeon trying to teach our two AI devices what Jell-O even was and why it was important.

Somehow we always land on a "Jell-O saves the world" narrative and this year will also follow that as this world needs a lot of saving right now. We are all reeling like much of the world at what is happening in the macrocosm so we plan to be extra ridiculous and hopefully provide some catharsis for our audience and ourselves. It has to be fun...and it isn't easy to find anything really funny about what is going on, without ignoring a lot of what isn't. But we are carefully navigating through all the things we want to say and a lot of things we can't say. 

The video of last year isn't the greatest but we're lucky to have it, as this show happens briefly once and then it is a memory. There have been a few shows that were superb and videos that were not, and none of us really remember everything. I know for a long time I was stuck in the back with my shirt table and couldn't see or hear what was happening on stage, before I started performing in 2013. Now the problem is more that I get tunnel vision on stage and am concentrating so hard on my lines and keeping things organized that I don't even see other people's costumes or how things work on set. I do know that people take up a lot more room than I expect and that's a big reason why I have to scale back my set plans every year. It's a little bit funny. Last year I had to take quite a few items home at tech rehearsal. 

But the years when it is more spare still work great if we maintain our cleverness throughout the collaborative writing part, where people write their parody songs and we attempt to fit them together in a coherent narrative that we can them build out as we go. I'm on script three this weekend and have outlined it, put in some lines, but plan to do a fully written version and then a streamlined one with the lyrics pulled out so everyone learns the sequence and we can identify hard cues. 

Our band is amazing and packed with real musical expertise so our practices are lively, with the guitars noodling and people singing little bits out loud as we also try to go through the script and firm things up. People develop their characters over time and we are honing in on how they will interact and what will be funny or fall flat. There is pacing to consider...like you have to keep any slower music confined so that no one gets bored, and you have to remember things like we only have a couple of mics and if you want your lines to be heard, you have to speak into them correctly. Most of us are amateurs at this; I know I am. 

But I do love this writing stage and it's fun letting my mind work out its ideas for the set pieces I am going to make. I love having a wide-ranging process for working on the production as well as the event, and I really love having this three-month (shorter now with the earlier show date of March 22) space to just enjoy it all. The only real rule we have is that is has to be fun.

Here's the video from last year. Sorry about losing my costume...it wasn't as well-thought out as I meant it to be. I thought the set changes worked out fairly well though, even though most of them weren't really necessary. The audience likes to use their imaginations too, so this year they will get to do that even more. 

 

 

Technique

 I need to read back myself and figure out things I have seemingly forgotten, like how to get the dried gelatin out of the dishes. I use pyrex pie plates, bowls, and other glass dishes to make the pieces because I like the gloss that comes from the surfaces, but actually flexible plastic is so much easier. 

I swirl the molten gelatin around in bowls to make large pieces for the flowers, conveniently shaped like flowers already. In the plastic bowls, the thinner edges generally pull away from the bowl as they dry, since it shrinks a little I believe. If the gelatin is in the right stage, I can pull on the loosened edges and pry the rest of the piece out carefully, avoiding tearing it, and the gelatin can stretch as it pulls away, adding lots of ruffle and shape that I can't control, which I like. Most times I can get it out in one piece, or a couple anyway.

With the glass bowls, the edges stick too tight, but sometimes I can make a little cut in the still wet gelatin in the bottom of the bowl and pull it out from there. Gelatin is surprisingly strong and holds itself together unless it is too thin or too wet. I can also get the edges  slightly wet, using a brush, and that rehydrates them enough to be at an earlier, more flexible stage. Other times I use a knife or my fingernail to cut through the wet part enough to get the piece starting to pull away enough to leverage the whole thing.

Sometimes with the pie plates I have to run a little water over the whole thing, a little like starting over, and then wait until it is at the "right stage." I am pretty sure this is my problem with things sticking too tightly to remove. I've gotten lazy about timing and am letting them dry too long before tending them.

If I mix it up in the late afternoon, it is usually too wet to mess with at bedtime, and by the time I get to it 12 or 18 hours later, I missed the flexible stages. If I mix it up in the morning and then try to flip it over before bed, that is probably better. I just have to plan it that way and then stick to the plans. 

When I assemble the pieces, I often brush them with water to bend them a little, tear them with a ruffly edge, or make a cut or glue a joint. To glue them, I use molten gelatin, spoon or dip the places I want to glue together, and hold them for 90 seconds, or prop them in some way that they will self-adhere. It can be messy and it takes a lot of time, as well as hand strength. I usually work on multiple pieces at once so they can sit and really get firmly attached, because it is easy to accidentally make them come apart and have to start over. They accumulate a layer of a kind of cubed-up gelatin that is past the glueing stage and just makes the joints thicker and less clean-looking. I generally try to scrape that off.

So in case you are working with the dried gelatin, here is my recipe again: Fill a quart canning jar half full of cold water, and stir in 6 ounces of gelatin powder, gradually, avoiding lumps. Hot water will lump it up fast, so be sure to use cold. (Hot water is advised for the Jell-O brand, to dissolve the bigger quantity of sugar, not the gelatin.) I just use plain, generic gelatin I buy in bulk online.

Then let the mixture sit for 10 minutes or so, to "bloom" or absorb water, and then melt it in the microwave for 2-3 minutes. It should end up clear, and then you can pour it into smaller jars to add dye or other things (like gold powder) and then into your dishes or molds.

If you are just starting out you may find silicone or plastic molds work easily. You can flex them to pop the pieces out, but keep them thinnish, say 1/4 inch thick or thinner. A cupcake of gelatin will not dry and will probably mold, but just the outside layer of a cupcake will work fine. 

There is usually a layer of foam on top of the quart jar, which you can skim off, lay in a plastic lid or something, and use for clouds or seafoam or lace, as it's nicely white. The plain gelatin is kind of yellowish. I just use fabric dyes mostly, because I have those around, but you can color it with a lot of things, from food coloring, to candy coloring to paint. I also have a lot of powdered pigments like metallics and neons that I use regularly. You should certainly experiment with what you have around rather than investing heavily in expensive art materials. Remember, Jell-O Art is kind of anti-art, in that is accessible, inexpensive, experimental and irreverent. Nobody is going to be a Jell-O Art Critic. 

So check on your gelatin after maybe 6 hours and see what it will do. You can cut it, press things into it, and later paint it or whatever works. You can coat fabrics or cheesecloth with it. Here's some human forms made eons ago by the person who first tried drying it, in our group anyway, Celeste LeBlanc. They're made from net and fabrics coated with the gelatin. I think she made it even thicker than I do, and embedded various things in it, like snakeskins and ribbons.

The image at the beginning of the blog I made by cutting a pie plate of fairly thick gelatin in a spiral cut, from the center out to the edge. Then I carefully pulled it out an hung it up to dry. It is boingy and very fun and I have made lots of these and smaller ones since then. Getting movement out of gelatin is just extra fun you can have.