How to Cook a Munchkin

Photo by Lisa Tolentino

Photo by Lisa Tolentino

A new piece by Lisa Tolentino and myself as part of our group Rules of Play.  This piece was performed for the Tempe storytelling event “The Feast” at Tempe Community Christian Church.

The piece uses recipes that were written by children from the Ishikawa Elementary School approximately ten years ago.  One of the teachers from this school, Susan Goodenberger, helped us in finding some of her student’s old recipes.  If you have ever seen young children’s recipes, they are adorable, hilarious and also very avant-garde.

We used parts of these recipes to construct the piece in a form that is part improvisatory and part through-composed.  The piece uses various percussion instruments and items from the kitchen as well as a vocoder, pitch shifter and pre-produced recordings.

Here is a recording of our first performance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch9BytjrRgU