gallery and theatre shows
Self-Portrait as a Thumb Piano at Myymälä 2, Helsinki, September 2021
A walking thumb piano plays itself and initiates a collective anti-national anthem and sonorous reflection on fragility. The thumb piano turns into a human being who cannot swim yet who promptly offers a highly detailed swimming lesson. An inquest is conducted into why it is not possible to reach the bottom of the sea in one breath and shimmer in ecstasy with the jellyfish. The impossible is imagined. The complex clapping ritual of the hand-sandwich is enacted and the human being turns into a slice of toast. They float away, being feasted upon by hundreds of tiny fish.
Con cuál cuchara come el sol? (With which spoon does the sun eat?) at Casa Viva, Mexico City, February 2020
Oscillating between reflections upon beauty and kindness and cruelty and evil amidst a stew of personal sharing and scientific/poetic rumination upon the sun, Huge invited each audience member to take hold of a ray of their sun mask before peeling it back and calling upon each person to share a memory of the sunshine. Through collective storytelling, a communion was created reflecting upon diverse themes including illness, racial identity, nurture and negligence, and the (im)possibility of hope in the Anthropocene.
The Cart Department Cabaret at Grace Exhibition Space, New York City, October 2018
This collaborative cabaret included participatory mash-ups of traditional Puerto Rican ballads and thrash metal improvisation sang through a vacuum cleaner, the destruction of a cardboard city with heavy chains and streams of urine, a ritual in worship of the divinity of asparagus, a presentation on the meaning of puppetry by an overqualified aubergine, and the funeral procession of ‘Sparkle Mouse’ – a field mouse found earlier that week deceased and covered in glitter within a bucket of Christmas baubles. Alongside Huge Sillytoe and other Cart Department founding members, this show included the collaboration of Crackhead Barney, Señor Langosta, and Ivangie Nieves.
One Tonne Fruit Bowl at SiteWorks, Hot! Hot! Hot! Climate Arts Festival, Melbourne, July 2016
Taking the UN environment programme’s conservative estimate that globally 1.3 billion tonnes of food produced for human consumption is wasted annually, combined with the ludicrously conservative estimate that one tonne of food takes one labour hour to produce, then that’s already 3.5 million hours, four hundred years, five entire lifetimes of eighty years thrown away per day. The reality is incalculably worse. Here our ‘wasting’ as creatures inevitably progressing towards death intersects with our wastefulness regarding food, environment, and time. For One Tonne Fruit Bowl, Huge Sillytoe collected masses of discarded fruits and vegetables from markets around Melbourne, inviting the audience to pelt them with peppers, oranges, and other organic missiles at the sound of a horn. The first fruit or vegetable to hit Huge in the spoon/face dictated the first of a series of short plays to be presented. Once the play was over, Huge returned to sit in their fruit bowl, the horn sounded once more, and the process repeated until another fruit or vegetable splattered on Huge’s spoon/face, dictating the commencement of another play. Plays included giving birth to a soldier, telepathically communicating with a stuffed dog on the other side of the planet, and Huge attaching cabbage leaves to their buttocks and being chased around the entire venue upon the announcement that the first audience member to successfully remove a leaf would win a prize (a cabbage). What a waste of time, no?
