Photo: Bobby Rogers, Walker Art Center
About the project
SuperGroup has been behind/in front of the screen doing loosely structured improvisations involving text sourced from Scruff profiles, shag carpet backdrops, candlelit missives, lying-in-bed-or-under-the-kitchen-counter choreography, and many other things we are mostly glad you didn't have to experience. We're still a group because we say we are, but is collectivism crumbling all around us? Should we drop out and go back to the land, share all our resources, and perform for the trees and the plants teeming in the communal garden? Should we stay here and keep making performances with a faith that us making for each other is what the making is all about? Should we change our name? So many questions... We do know that we won't exactly be staging a union meeting nor a community town hall, and we won't exactly be dancing those structures either, but maybe something somewhere in between. Can we have our cake and eat it also?
Update #3: April 12, 2022
Update #1: October 18, 2021
One time, a very long time ago, I had a comedy professor—a professor of comedy—tell me to begin looking at the world through “comedy-colored glasses.” Is this what a comedy residency is? To be constantly residing in a world of bemusement? Isn’t that funny that I have no energy? Isn’t it wild how many people die every day? Wildly hilarious? It sort of reminds me of Willy Wonka’s fizzy lifting juice; totally impossible.
Impossible like a film that never happens; a documentary that should have been billed as a mockumentary, that never gets made, so all we have is the theatrical trailer. Or what about beautiful images of a dance, presented as if this dance concert happened, and people attended, but you didn’t attend, and in fact, you start to wonder if it really did happen. But then they start marketing that performance around to grants and residencies as if it was real? Remember that? Wasn’t that funny?
Can we reside in something and share it with you? Can we try a little bit harder to reside in hilarity? Without hurting people? I’m not sure, because there is still that memory of this angry woman on the subway one time, who felt like my laughter was obtrusive. Way too loud. I’m still ashamed. I wasn’t aiming it at her, it wasn’t about her, but that laughter was offensive to her. And that is going to happen when people’s lives are truly shitty. So you (or I… or we) are faced with this decision, to try to lift yourself up, and maybe hopefully, others through association, even if that is audacious in the given context, aka reality—or not. But also, by even acknowledging comedy as an “effort”, don’t I set myself up to fail? People are going to judge just how funny we are if we admit we are trying. Is comedy supposed to play like it didn’t know it was doing it? Like the innocent, the clown, with a wink perceptible to only those who are looking for it.
About SuperGroup
SuperGroup is a Minneapolis-based performance collaboration of Erin Search-Wells, Sam Johnson, and Jeffrey Wells. Since forming in 2007, we have presented work at venues across the Twin Cities including the Bryant Lake Bowl, the Red Eye, Bedlam Theatre, the Ritz, and the Walker Art Center, as well as nationally at the Invisible Dog Art Center (NYC, presented by the Joyce Theater), Velocity Dance Center (Seattle), Philadelphia Dance Projects/ Temple University (Philadelphia), and ODC (San Francisco). Our work has been supported through commissions from the Walker Art Center, the Red Eye Theater, The MN Museum of American Art, and the Southern Theater, and through grants from the Jerome Foundation, the SCUBA Touring Network, the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council of MN, the MN State Arts Board, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the McKnight Foundation.