Into the heart of MayDay
It takes all kinds of people to make a village function. And the MayDay workshop at In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre is nothing if not a village. Every year since 1975, the south Minneapolis theater company has orchestrated the MayDay Parade, Ceremony and Festival -- that rollicking procession of puppetry, music, social activism and general springtime merriment that winds down Bloomington Avenue toward Powderhorn Park on the first Sunday in May.
It's hard to believe that the whole pageant, breathtaking in scope and meticulously choreographed, is produced almost entirely by volunteers with donated materials. Yet each year, Heart of the Beast opens its E. Lake Street doors to the public, inviting anyone and everyone to lend a hand in creating the masks, costumes, puppets and props that make the event such a spectacle. Preschools bring their toddlers. Parents bring their kids. Teachers bring their students. It's a heartwarming scene.
This year, we stepped into the April workshops, hoping to meet a few faces behind MayDay -- and maybe slap around a bit of papier-mâché while we were at it.
The Matriarch
When Sandy Spieler talks about MayDay, she often does so in a booming voice -- usually because she's addressing a theater lobby full of volunteers. Before each meeting, she greets the crowd and runs through a brief synopsis of this year's storyboard, which is illustrated on three long sheets of paper mounted near the ceiling. Spieler is the matriarch of the parade. She has been Heart of the Beast's artistic director for 35 years, going back to the first-ever parade, and is one of the theater's original founders. She's eloquent about the parade's themes and references.
"I always talk about MayDay," she says, "as the twining of two traditional roots: the green root, which celebrates chlorophyll, the green blood of the Earth, and the red root, associated with workers' holidays around the world, which celebrates the human imagination, intention and work -- [basically] our mind, heart and hands."
Of all the people involved in MayDay, Spieler seems to engage most cerebrally with the parade's content. After community brainstorm sessions -- during which local residents are invited to articulate the concerns affecting them, effectively setting the tone for the year's parade -- Spieler meets with a team of staff artists to help translate the ideas into imagery.
This year's first brainstorming occurred two weeks after President Obama's inauguration. "There was a lot of optimism," she remembers. "I haven't heard that since Sept. 11th. But along with that optimism, there is financial pain and fear, and skepticism as to whether 'change' can go as far as it needs to. People are really feeling like something is cracking. And as it crumbles, will something new emerge?"
The Poet
During the very first community workshop, among the buzz of kids making messes at paint tables, a gray-haired woman sat calmly in a folding chair, soaking in the tumult. She's Florence Dacey, a poet from Cottonwood, Minn., here on a grant from the Southwest Arts and Humanities Council.
Her task? To provide a sort of poetic consultation to the parade, lending a writer's touch to its realization. That, and to compose lyrics for a song used in the Baby Spider Dance, a piece in the parade in which a huge web will be woven across the street.
Dacey refers to MayDay as "an indispensable ritual of spring for me." "I'm stunned by the images, first of all," she says. "The eagle, the prairie, the tree of life, the white deer, the snake ... these great mythic figures. I recognize them as manifestations of what I knew deep in my soul and mind from living out where I live and living the life of a poet."
The Professor
Harry Waters Jr., a jovial man who wears a white bandana over kempt dreads, teaches a course in community theater at Macalester College. For a final project, he requires his students to attend the MayDay workshop, as a sort of whirlwind practicum. Undoubtedly a drama teacher, Waters speaks in grand, oratorical tones and takes delight in the spontaneous inspirations that often happen in the workshop.
"Something happens to these students when they come down here," he says. "All of a sudden, you're standing at a table with someone you've never met, painting something or making papier-mâché. And you have to talk to that person. You have to actually engage. You always learn from that. And something smart usually comes out of it."
While working on the "Sprout" section of the parade -- which will be characterized by grass-clad "chia leaders" welcoming a new green economy -- he came across one such discovery. "I kept thinking that I wanted to make their pompons out of natural stuff. And then the other day, I was having lunch across the street [at the Mercado Central], I had a few tamales, and I thought, 'Oh, my God, what if I used these husks for the pompons?'"
Waters' student Zuri Tobechukwu digs the physicality of the workshops. "You're not just stuck in your head, intellectualizing," she said. Smearing a paste of flour, water and cornstarch onto a notched piece of cardboard, she adds, "You're present from the crown of your head to the edge of your toes."
The Tool Guy
Alan Olson might have the best job in the entire workshop. A kindly man with long silver hair and a perpetual smile, Olson affects a friendly Ben Franklin vibe. He's part of the Tool Room Crew, a trio of jokesters who hold down the theater box office, which has been converted into a sort of drive-through window for supplies. Olson and his crew -- Celia the Tool Chick and Repo, a woman whose gentleness belies the punk-rock dog collar that she wears -- crack wise while distributing staple guns, brushes, box cutters and anything else volunteers and artists might need. When someone shouts, "Hey, do you got an awl back there?" Olson's quick to respond: "Oh, we got it all."
It's a "Pee-wee's Playhouse" kind of scene, rife with tomfoolery, and one begins to wonder if there might be a magic word that triggers even more silliness.
Olson, a volunteer with MayDay since 2001, is a Wiccan. Instead of the standard name tag worn by other volunteers, he sports a label with his name spelled out in a runic language. He says MayDay resonates with his connections to the Earth, an intimacy developed during his career as a fossil hunter and goldsmith. "I've always felt that the Earth has left us her diary," he says, alluding to his fossil work, "and we just need to learn how to read it."
Olson will also map out a labyrinth in Powderhorn Park that can be walked during the Tree of Life Ceremony following the parade. With a background in theater, Olson sees MayDay as a natural blending of his interests. And it isn't just him.
"There's a lot of cross-pollination going on here," he says. "The artists meet the political people who meet the theater people who meet the pagan folks. It gets to be like a family."
