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| Spike appearing as a "plug-in" character in Germany at the 3rd International Varieté Festival produced by Dirk Denzer Productions in 2009. |
Spike was first performed at the Celebration Barn in "Night Fright", a Halloween show that featured myself, Fritz Grobe and Mike Miclon. This show was around 1990 making Spike about 20 years old! The Spike creation started some time after I had learned to walk on stilts followed by an idea of two opposite characters inspired by music from Peter Gabriel's Birdie soundtrack and David Byrne's The Forest. I imagined that one creature would hatch causing the audience to misinterpret gestures of nurturing as violence in a scene of opposites: slow soft white round balloons vs. fast hard black needle-like spikes. The character that seemed like a predator would turn out to be guarding its young, a lesson in not jumping to conclusions all too soon.
With Fritz' help, I carefully constructed the first Spike costume following the lines of the body and the concept that "form should efficiently follow function". This concept was used often by my mime and theater mentor, Tony Montanaro, and by designers and architects I had studied in college. In this application, I could play with how this concept comes to us from nature. In order to do this correctly we had to innovate the stilt design so that the stilt performer had to use stirrups instead of the more comfortable and conventional angled attachments for the feet. Conventional stilts simply wouldn't maintain the long line we needed and the illusion of the creature would be broken. It required some careful craftsmanship and working of materials in such a way to solve this and many other physical challenges to comfortably move in the costume. Eventually we succeeded in creating the Spike costume and it came out pretty slick after a lot of very tricky sewing patterns! We ran the piece at the Celebration Barn Theater that October about a dozen times with other spooky sketches. Although a bit crude as the other costume was, the Spike sketch "worked". Audiences were captivated by the creatures, loved the surprise ending, and the clever play of opposites.
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| An unauthorized reproduction of Spike by Neil Goldberg's Cirque Productions |
Unfortunately, with the exception of the early theater performances of Spike, the original piece featuring "Mr. Bubbles," the anti-Spike character made of balloons and foam that made it into a wonderful theater sketch had been forgotten. The remnants of Mr. Bubbles had turned yellow and were in the prop graveyard up in the attic of my studio-warehouse in Buckfield, Maine. Spike got all the attention because of the sleek stilt design and the fact that it was portable and easy to plug-in to other productions. The full sketch was more expensive. It required a trained assistant and accommodations and travel for two. But Spike was an anonymously cool concept (no performer was visible) and made for a great publicity stills!
In 2001 to 2005 I constructed a large new rehearsal studio in Buckfield and by 2005 conversations began to make an internet video short of the sketch in order to share the original concept with a larger on-line audience. Some work began on the redesigning of Mr. Bubbles and some improvements were made to the Spike costumes in preparation for the shoot. This R&D got put on hold for three or four years and the new Mr. Bubbles costume remained "half-baked." But in the spring of 2009, the Celebration Barn invited me to resurrect the original sketch for a big fundraising event that summer. Initially, I turned it down because the equipment wasn't near ready and I had no one trained to perform the "Baby Spike" roll. Still, it was a golden opportunity to further the sketch. So I contacted a student of mine from Philadelphia, Kyle Driggs, to see if he would performer and assist. It just happened that the Barn was offering a new inexpensive "open residency" program in the weeks before the fundraising show. So Kyle agreed to come all the way up to Maine and take the 2 week Barn open residency preparing the improved, updated version.
Those 3 weeks proved fun but very difficult. The design work was wicked hard. It took three weeks of continuous work to bring the second character, Mr Bubbles, to life. He needed to be brought up to the same level as Spike with new construction techniques. Manufacturing a life size egg-spore-shell-like thing that comes apart on cue is no easy task. The egg is one of mother nature's proudest achievements and apparently she doesn't like copy-cats!
The goal was to use the deadline of the fundraiser as a stepping stone to prepare for the winter video shoot. The customized equipment had do exactly the right things on stage consistently, be light and break down for touring, and be made of materials that would work for the outdoor video as well as able to withstand the wear-and-tear of many rehearsals and shows. It was a little scary, but thankfully, once again opening night, "it worked." The crowd was delighted. Spike was a hit once again!
