Entertainment

Flotsam, a Floating Circus, Is a Joyful Space For All | Arts Stories & Interviews | St. Louis

Published

2 years ago

September 22, 2023

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click to enlarge Jet McDonald Flotsam’s characters deal with the end of the world, sea monsters and the Prophet of Doom.

Flotsam River Circus, a touring troupe of circus artists and musicians, floated into town earlier this month on a “handmade, ramshackle raft” assembled largely from scavenged materials — and put on a show.

At a Flotsam performance, the audience imagines that the world has ended, that what remains is just a few hungry humans on a boat surrounded by invasive mutant fish and existential threats — but that such a world can nevertheless contain camaraderie, beautiful movement, singing and laughter. Thanks to effective pantomime, the audience knows that the clown’s suitcase is impossible to lift. Yet, someone special may be up to the task, if given plenty of encouragement.

The characters perform stunts, clown and sing as they navigate harrowing encounters with both a sea monster and a Prophet of Doom. The performance takes place on the 32-foot Flotsam vessel, featuring a crow’s nest, two motors, a small cabin with tattered curtains and a platform complete with ladder, rocking chair and tuba — and has drawn audiences from the hundreds to the thousands.

In short, it is unlike anything else. And that’s the appeal.

“I hope people remember it wrong — and even more wild,” puppeteer Kalan Sherrard says during the final week of Flotsam’s 2023 tour, which ended on September 10 in St. Louis.

But though St. Louis was always scheduled to be the circus’ last stop, the three planned performances here almost didn’t happen. After the September 8 show between the Martin Luther King Bridge and Eads Bridge, a staffer in Mayor Tishaura Jones office told the circus to cease the shows— founder Jason Webley told the RFT that he hadn’t gotten a permit for the performances.

Webley ultimately moved the shows to a spot near Mural Mile, saying that he does not want the situation to be viewed as conflict with the city and hopes to return on a future tour. Shows two and three occurred without issue, against the dramatic backdrop of the MacArthur Bridge at sunset and the ambient rattle of passing freight trains.

“The trick with Flotsam is for it to always feel like it’s about to not happen and completely fall apart,” Webley says.
click to enlarge Jet McDonald St. Louis was the tour’s last stop.
It’s good luck that things stayed together, both for St. Louis and for the circus itself. Flotsam is many things to many people: a symbol of creative possibilities; a series of epic journeys; a step toward renewing communities’ connections to their natural environments; and a haven for anyone seeking a couple hours of joy — including those in the LGBTQ+ community, who are, as ever, in need of meaningful, subversive, affirming spaces.

Flotsam began as a dream of Webley’s, an Everett, Washington, based troubadour. He’d gotten the idea for a floating troupe maintaining a show schedule of near-daily travel and performances, and the first tour took place in 2019.

“The definition of ‘flotsam’ is garbage or debris floating on a body of water, usually from a wreck. Flotsam, my Flotsam … it’s a piece of art that floats down the river.”

This summer, Flotsam began its tour in the Twin Cities, where the cast rendezvoused with the boat from as far away as Seattle. There, the cast rehearsed for a week and a half before setting off down the Mississippi on August 4. They passed through towns in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Missouri. St. Louis concluded a 33-show tour that spanned five weeks and over 670 river miles. All were free to attend, with donations welcome.

“It’s important that [the show] is accessible,” says Kalan Sherrard, a puppeteer.
click to enlarge Jet McDonald The performance takes place mostly on the 32-floot Flotsam vessel.

Both Webley and Sherrard say Flotsam doesn’t have one unifying message or plot. “I want it to not have a specific story but also not not have a story … [not just] a series of acts but more like a bunch of characters interacting, and maybe magical circus things keep happening,” Webley says. Large portions are wordless, which he says helps to “cast a certain spell.”

Webley does, however, hold up several signs featuring lines such as “the water has risen” and “little remains of the life we know” at the beginning to orient the audience. At times, the cast moves through the crowd playing instruments and wearing mutant fish costumes, mostly gray and pink garments with an excess of eyes and teeth, as well as some fish netting and superfluous fins. Sherrard gives a reflective, partly improvised speech toward the end that posits many possible ways of looking at Flotsam.

Matthew “Poki” McCorkle says of his character, and perhaps the onlookers as well, “There’s this doom and destruction on the horizon; who’s going to be there to ignore the message?” To Webley, the characters who pay no attention to their world “dissolving” are not necessarily wrong or right, nor is the Prophet of Doom character necessarily wrong or right.

“[We’re] just doing a story in the future,” fiddler Miriam Oommen says.

Flotsam’s 2023 cast was Webley (project originator, boat-builder, accordionist, vocalist, mutant fish), Sherrard (puppeteer, Prophet of Doom), Sari Breznau (percussionist, trumpeter, vocalist, many-breasted mermaid), Sadye Osterloh (acrobat, trapeze artist, physical comedian), McCorckle (mime, hairhang artist, balancer, Flotsam treasurer), Tanya Gagne (aerialist, trapeze artist, and hula hooper), Oommen (fiddle player and folk jam facilitator), and Ferdusol Intérprete (clown, mime, dancer). Many perform with other circuses, such as UP UP UP Crane Truck Circus. Not all of the original cast returned, but most of the current members have done multiple tours since 2019, which have included the Willamette River, Seattle waterways and the Sacramento River.

A new presence in 2023 was Otis, Osterloh and McCorckle’s 11-month-old baby. Otis delighted in the boat and the water, as well as listening to Sherrard play music using only a balloon. One of Otis’ most memorably unpredictable moments was peeing on the Flotsam library — a stash of zines and books, including, fittingly, A Book of Surrealist Games.

“We’re trying to guess what he’s going to be like … he’s always changing,” McCorkle says. He thrived on the doting attention of the cast, as well as crew member Matty Semkowich, who watched Otis during the shows — in addition to playing key roles with boat operation and gathering supplies, often via dumpster-diving.

Sherrard says that one of the central features of this project is its ‘ecological’ nature. “Of course [Flotsam] has a footprint, but it’s this idea of trying to activate rivers — these huge thoroughfares — while we’re increasingly divorced from nature,” Sherrard says.
click to enlarge Jet McDonald Children play at the edge of the water during the performance.

At every St. Louis show, small children from the audience played by the water. They tossed stones, shifted driftwood, sculpted sand, poured water from littered cups and splashed. Proximity to nature was made inevitable. During the first performance, one small child could be heard saying, “There’s an ant in my shirt,” to which their friend replied, “So? You don’t have to interrupt the show for that.”

Beyond the moment-to-moment action, Webley says, “I don’t think it has to be conscious, but I think that there’s this slightly ritual aspect of coming in the evening to the river. … When we pulled into St. Louis, part of [the moment] was the emotion of, ‘We made it to the last place,’ but also part of it was tangibly knowing a bit about St. Louis’ history with the riverfront. And it just [felt] really special and specific that we were here doing this and people were coming.”

One of Flotsam’s supporters, Crackers, has been following the tours since the beginning. He is a key part of operations, like flyering, as half of a duo dubbed ‘Jetsam.’ Crackers says that every time he’s seen the show, he’s been in a bad place, but that by the end he is “maybe not fully healed but on the path.” Other St. Louis audience members came from as far away as Rhode Island. Sherrard, who performs internationally as enormousface, also gave an “anti-narrative” solo puppet show at CBGB on South Grand on September 9.

Webley calls Flotsam “a love project” and that there’s little he wouldn’t give up to keep it going. Crowd donations, in the form of cash tossed into the open mouth of the sea monster and also plain old Venmo or PayPal, get them closer to solvency. Many audience members, especially children feeding the sea monster, were happy to donate.

Attendees said they had not known exactly what to expect; many learned about Flotsam via social media, friends or flyers. Others voiced pleasant surprise at the high quality of the music.

click to enlarge Jet McDonald Donations can be made directly into the sea monster, thank you.

“Every show makes me feel different. But, in general, there’s kind of a humor to it [that] has a bit of an edge but also is for the kids,” Oommen reflects. “My previous experience playing in bands is that the majority of the audience is 20- or 30-year-olds, but with this project in some of these small towns, those are the only people that weren’t there.”

For Oommen, creative work and identity closely intermingle. “I see gender as performance, and I’m also a performer, and I came out [as trans] through the punk scene — finding other people who were performing and expressing different gender identities in artistic contexts,” she says. “So I see performance, art, music and gender identity as really pretty intertwined, which is definitely not how everybody sees it.

“Performing is almost like a shield, so I almost have an incentive to be on the stage because people respect you. … I love it, but it also is a tool to be accepted. I haven’t come through a lot of harassment [on tour]. And the crew — I’m not sure how many of them identify strongly with queerness, but they’re all very familiar.”

Post-tour, Oommen’s plans include traveling around a bit then heading back to Eugene, Oregon. She is working as Miriam Hacksaw on a solo folk fiddle project that taps her Malayali-Americanheritage. “In folk music, as in anarchy, sometimes certain voices are heard louder than others, but it’s also a space in which people can assert their voices,” she says.

Performance also relates to gender for McCorkle. In the show, they describe themself as having a generally masculine gender expression with “maybe a little more rouge than a captain would wear normally.” Playing with norms is salient to them as a queer person visible on stage and that it is one facet of the show’s ability to bridge gaps with a variety of people and places. “Keeping the conversation going even in small ways feels pretty important,” they say.
click to enlarge Jet McDonald An audience gathers to watch the first performance of Flotsam.

One of their many artistic ventures includes a “father-son magic duo” with Osterloh as the father and McCorkle as the son. McCorkle points out that magic is often gendered, with a woman as a passive assistant to a man executing all the magic. Their act with Osterloh keeps “the beauty of the tricks” yet re-frames and subverts “all these ‘magic dude’ vibes.” The duo performed at the Portland Juggling Festival immediately following Flotsam.

The Flotsam crew packed the boat up the day after the third St. Louis show, loading its components back onto the trailer to be stored until the next tour (likely the Ohio River in 2024). The post-show celebration on the final night included a dinner with many raised glasses and much gratitude expressed among the cast and crew.

But Flotsam may linger in audiences’ consciousnesses long after the boat has traveled on to a new river. “I talked to this four-year-old in Minneapolis who said ‘I had nightmares about the sea monster. I dreamed the sea monster was six times bigger — bigger than a house — and it ate everyone, and then the person with the unicorn horn saved everyone,’” Sherrard says. That’s kinda my dream, too.”

Anyone who catches a future show may feel that the world is both constantly dissolving and constantly being saved, and that, either way, laughing together on a riverbank can be much more than a novelty.
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Five Fun Facts About Busch Stadium You Didn’t Know

Published

10 months ago

July 30, 2024

Natural Bridge

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When baseball fans roll into St. Louis, Busch Stadium often tops their must-see list. But this iconic ballpark has more hidden gems beyond baseball — and even beyond its souvenir shops and good hotdogs. Here’s a lineup of interesting facts that’ll make you the MVP in Busch Stadium trivia.

From Ballpark to Brewing Brand Deal

A 1900 postcard showing the Oyster House of Tony Faust, founder of the brewing firm | Courtesy Anheuser-Busch.

Busch Stadium has a past that’s more refreshing than a cold beer. Before becoming the shrine of Cardinals baseball, it was a multipurpose park called Sportsman”s Park in 1953. Anheuser-Busch, the brewing giant that owned the Cardinals for a time, purchased the stadium and called it Busch Stadium.

Talk about brewing a partnership with a home run!

Museum for Baseball Maniacs

One can explore unique stadium models, step into the broadcast booth to relive Cardinals’ historic moments and hold authentic bats from team legends in this Museum | Courtesy Cardinals Nation

The St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame and Museum is an 8,000-square-foot tribute to baseball’s rich history. Opening on the Cardinals’ 2014 Opening Day, this shrine charts the team’s stories from its 1882 beginnings when it was still called the American Association Browns. Here, you can revel in the team’s 11 World Series Championships and 19 pennants. And if you’re feeling adventurous, watch the game from the museum’s roof—the Hoffmann Brothers Rooftop—complete with a full-service bar and an all-you-can-eat menu. It’s like VIP seating, but with more hot dogs.

Even the Fans Break World Records

Busch Stadium is more than a ballpark; it’s a record-breaking arena.

In one memorable event, Nathan’s Famous set a Guinness World Record for the most selfies taken simultaneously—4,296, to be exact. Just imagine trying to squeeze all those selfies into a single frame!

Not to be outdone, Edward Jones and the Alzheimer’s Association formed the largest human image of a brain on the field in 2018. With 1,202 people, the image was like a giant, multi-colored brain freeze.

1,202 people gathered in centerfield at Busch Stadium to form a multi-coloured brain image | Screenshot from Guinness World Records.

The MLB Park in Your Backyard

Are you an avid Cardinals fan, thinking about living near the stadium? The cost of living in the area might be in your favor.

A 2017 study by Estately.com shows that media prices for homes around Busch Stadium is the fourth least expensive among around 26 major MLB stadiums. When San Francisco Giants fans have to pay up $1,197,000 that year for the same convenience of catching a game at a walking distance, Cardinal fans can snag real estate at only $184,900. If that’s not a walk-off win of a deal, we’re not sure what is.

Big Cleats to Fill as Busch Stadium Eyes Expansion

Those wanting to invest in property near Busch Stadium better get it while it’s still affordable. Rumor has it Busch Stadium could soon expand. That rumor has been going around for three decades since talks to raise public money allegedly started. We’ll believe it when we see it.

According to Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt III, plans are likely to mirror recent projects for the Milwaukee Brewers and Baltimore Orioles, with price tags hovering around $500 to $600 million. But the real investment is still up for debates pending a concrete cost-benefit analysis on the stadium’s surrounding area.

So the next time you kick back with a cold beer and catch a game at Busch Stadium, be in awe of the fact there’s more to the place than what meets the batter’s eye. Pitch these interesting facts at trivia night or to your Hinge date who’s new in town. Who knows – you might just win a home run beer.

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Nashville Police Officer Arrested for Appearing in Adult Video

Published

11 months ago

June 14, 2024

Natural Bridge

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A Nashville police officer, Sean Herman, 33, has been arrested and charged with two counts of felony official misconduct after allegedly appearing in an adult video on OnlyFans while on duty. Herman was fired one day after detectives became aware of the video last month.

The video, titled “Can’t believe he didn’t arrest me,” shows Herman, participating in a mock traffic stop while in uniform, groping a woman’s breasts, and grabbing his genitals through his pants. The officer’s face is not visible, but his cruiser, patrol car, and Metro Nashville Police Department patch on his shoulder are clearly visible.

The Metro Nashville Police Department launched an investigation immediately upon discovering the video. The internal investigation determined Herman to be the officer appearing in the video. He was fired on May 9 and arrested on June 14, with a bond set at $3,000.

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Jane Smiley’s New Novel, Lucky, Draws on Her Charmed St. Louis Childhood

Published

12 months ago

May 22, 2024

Natural Bridge

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Like any good St. Louisan, Jane Smiley has an opinion on the high school question.

“If you ask somebody in St. Louis, ‘Where did you go to high school’ — because each school is so unique, you do get a sense of what their life was like and where they live,” says the John Burroughs graduate. “Where are you from? What do you like? And, you know, the answer is always interesting.”

That’s pretty much what Jodie Rattler, the main character of Smiley’s latest novel, Lucky, thinks.

“School, in St. Louis, is a big question, especially high school,” Rattler muses toward the start of the story. “… My theory about this is not that the person who asks wants to judge you for your socioeconomic position, rather that he or she wants to imagine your neighborhood, since there are so many, and they are all different.”

This parallel thought pattern is even less of a coincidence than the author/subject relationship implies. Lucky, which Alfred A. Knopf published last month, is nominally the story of Jodie, a folk musician gone fairly big who hails from our fair town. But the book is more than just its plot: It’s an ode to St. Louis and an exploration of the life Jane Smiley might have lived — if only a few things were different.

The trail to Lucky started in 2019, when Smiley returned here for her 50th high school reunion and agreed to a local interview. The radio host asked why she’d never set a novel in St. Louis.

“I thought, ‘Boy, why haven’t I done that?'” Smiley remembers. “And so then I thought, ‘Well, maybe I should think about it.’ And I decided since I love music, and St. Louis is a great music town, that I would maybe do an alternative biography of myself if I had been a musician, and of course I would say where she went to [high] school. So that’s what got me started. And the more I got into it, the more I enjoyed it.” click to enlarge DEREK SHAPTON Jane Smiley rocketed to literary stardom after winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for A Thousand Acres. She now has more than 25 books to her name.

The Life Jane Smiley Didn’t Live

Jane Smiley has always felt really lucky.

First, there was her background: She grew up with a “very easygoing and fun family.” Growing up in Webster Groves, she enjoyed wandering through the adjacent neighborhoods and exploring how spaces that were so close together could have such different vibes.

Then there was her career, which kicked into gear when she was 42 with the publication of A Thousand Acres, a retelling of King Lear set on a farm in Iowa. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1991 and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1992. It became a movie and, two years ago, an opera. Since then, she’s been steadily publishing and now has more than 25 books to her name.

“I was lucky in the way that my career got started,” Smiley says. “It was lucky in a way that it continued. I was lucky to win the Pulitzer. And I really enjoyed that. I said, ‘OK, I want to write about someone who’s lucky, but I don’t want it to be me. Because I want to contemplate the idea of luck, and see how maybe it works for somebody else.'”

click to enlarge

Both the book, and Jodie’s good luck, start at Cahokia Downs in 1955. Jodie’s Uncle Drew, a father stand-in, takes her to the racetrack and has her select the numbers on a bet that turns his last $6 into $5,986. She gets $86 of the winnings in a roll of $2 bills.

Smiley, a horse lover throughout her life, used to love looking at the horses at the racetrack before she understood how “corrupt it is at work.” (She also reminisces about pony rides at the corner of Brentwood and Manchester across from St. Mary Magdalen Church and riding her horse at Otis Brown Stables.)

Unlike Smiley, Jodie is not a horse person. And at first, Jodie feels somewhat disconnected from her luck — it’s something other people tell her that she possesses. She’s lucky to live where she does. She’s lucky that her mom doesn’t make her clear her plate, that her uncle has a big house, that she gets into John Burroughs. Later, she begins to carry those bills around as a talisman.

“[I] made a vow never to spend that roll of two-dollar bills — that was where the luck lived,” Jodie thinks after a narrow miss with a tornado.

It’s John Burroughs that changes Jodie’s life, just as it did Smiley’s. But instead of falling in love with books in high school and becoming a writer, Jodie falls into music. She eventually gets into songwriting, penning tunes as a sophomore at Penn State that launch her career.

One of Jodie’s songs should instantly resonate for St. Louis readers.

“The third one was about an accident I heard had happened in St. Louis,” Jodie recalls in the book, “a car going off the bridge over the River des Peres, which may have once been a river but was now a sewer. My challenge was to make sense of the story while sticking in a bunch of odd St. Louis street names — Skinker, of course, DeBaliviere, Bompart, Chouteau, Vandeventer. The chorus was about Big Bend. The song made me cry, but I never sang it to anyone but myself.”

Throughout the book are Jodie’s lyrics, alongside the events that inspire them. Writing them was a new experience for Smiley, who found herself picking up a banjo gifted by an ex and strumming the few songs she’d managed to learn, as well as revisiting the popular music of the novel’s time — the Beatles (George is Smiley’s favorite), Janis Joplin and the Traveling Wilburys, along with Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, and Peter, Paul and Mary — basically “all the folk singers.”

“I really love music, and I do wish I’d managed to practice, which I was always a failure at,” Smiley says. “… I liked that they made up their own lyrics, and they made their own music, and I was impressed by that.”

Both Smiley and Jodie grew up in households replete with record players and music. It’s one of their great commonalities.

A great difference between the two? That would be sex. At one point, Jodie compares her body count, which she calls the “Jodie Club,” with a lover — 25 (rounded up, Jodie notes) to his 150.

“That was a lot of fun,” says Smiley. “She learns a lot from having those affairs, and she enjoys it. She’s careful. And I like the fact that she never gets married, and she doesn’t really have any regrets about that.” (Smiley has been married four times.) “In some sense, her musical career has made her want to explore those kinds of issues of love and connection and sex and the way guys are.”

You can tell Smiley had a good time writing this. After Jodie loses her virginity, she thinks, “The erection had turned into a rather cute thing that flopped to one side.”

“Oh, it was fun,” Smiley confirms. “Sometimes I would say, ‘OK, what can I have Jodie do next? What’s something completely different than what I did when I was her age?’ And then I’d have to think about that and try and come up with something that was actually interesting. I knew that she couldn’t do all the things that I had done, and she had to be kind of a different person than I was. And so I made her a little more independent, and a little more determined.”

click to enlarge VIA THE SCHOOL YEARBOOK Jane Smiley’s high school yearbook photo. In Lucky, Jodie recalls of a classmate, “The gawky girl had stuck her head into a basketball basket, taken hold of the rim, and her caption was, ‘They always have the tall girls guard the basket.'”

Lucky follows Jodie from childhood to into her late 60s. At several points in the novel, she crosses paths with a Burroughs classmate, identified only as the “gawky girl.” Jodie takes note of her former classmate, but she’s not recognized.

Toward the end, Jodie walks into Left Bank Books and sees the gawky girl’s name on the cover of a novel.

“Out of curiosity, I read a few things about the gawky girl. Apparently she really had been to Greenland, and the Pulitzer novel was based on King Lear, which I thought was weird, but I did remember that when we read King Lear in senior English, I hadn’t liked it,” Jodie thinks. “… I remembered walking past her in the front hall of the school, maybe a ways down from the front door. She was standing there smiling, her glasses sliding down her nose, and one of the guys in our class, one of the outgoing ones, not one of the math nerds that abounded, stopped and looked at her, and said, ‘You know, I would date you if you weren’t so tall.'”

Sound familiar? Does it help to know Smiley is 6’2″?

The doppelgangers meet face to face after their 50th Burroughs’ reunion at the Fox and Hounds bar at the Cheshire. To go into what happens next — it’s too much of a spoiler.

“In every book, there’s always a surprise,” Smiley says. click to enlarge ZACHARY LINHARES Smiley enjoys St. Louis place names, and DeBaliviere is one of many in the novel.

Jodie Rattler’s St. Louis

Lucky is a smorgasbord of familiar names and places for St. Louis readers, and picking them out will be a big part of the joy of the book for locals.

“I love many things about St. Louis — not exactly the humidity, but lots of other things,” Smiley says. “One of the things I love is how weird the street names are. So I had to put her in that house on Skinker, and I had to refer to a few other places that are kind of weird. I couldn’t fit them all in.

“But I love the way that those street names and St. Louis are a real mix, and some of them are true French street names. Some of them are true English street names. Like Grav-wah or Grav-whoy” — here she deploys first the French and then the St. Louis version of “Gravois” — “whatever you want to call it, and Clark. It’s just really interesting to look around there and sense all of the different cultures that lived there and went through there.”

Jodie grows up in a house on Skinker near Big Bend. It’s “a pale golden color, with the tile roof and the little balcony,” Smiley writes. Jodie walks through Forest Park and eats at Schneithorst’s. Her mother works at the Muny; she shops at Famous Barr. Her grandfather prefers the “golf course near our house on Skinker,” which must be the Forest Park course. Jodie goes to Cardinals games, the Saint Louis Zoo and Grant’s Farm. She visits and thinks about St. Louis’ parks such as Tilles and Babler. Even the county jail in Clayton gets a mention.

Of course, Chuck Berry shows up several times, first mentioned for getting “in trouble for doing something that I wouldn’t understand.” Later, as Jodie drives by his home, she drops some shade on the county along the way: “Aunt Louise knew where Phyllis Schlafly’s house was, so I drove past there — another reason not to choose Ladue,” she writes.

Jodie and the man who invented rock & roll later meet face-to-face briefly at a festival near San Jose, California. “My favorite parts were getting to walk up to Chuck Berry and say, ‘I’m from St. Louis, too. Skinker!’ and having him reply, ‘Cards, baby!’ and know that no one nearby knew what in the world we were talking about,” Jodie recalls.

Lucky feels like a bit of a members-only club, and here the club is St. Louis. There is barely a page that is without some kind of reference — to the point where one might wonder if non-locals can even keep up. (Though they should rest assured: It’s a good read.)

“I write more or less to do what I want to do, and so I wrote about the things that interested me,” Smiley says. And more than 50 years after she graduated high school and left Webster Groves for Iowa and (briefly) Iceland and California, where she lives today, St. Louis, clearly, qualifies.

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