The Embarcadero Building at Fair Park is littered with cots, camp stools, a stack of toppled wooden drawers, and barrels and tires lying on their sides. Built in 1936 for the Texas Centennial Exposition, the 27,000-square-foot structure looks abandoned.
But a closer look reveals that the vast, open space also holds a bank of projectors, a stage with musical instruments, curtains hung from the 20-foot ceilings, a silk pole for climbing and 1,001 origami cranes, which represent hope in Japanese culture.
With producers at the ready behind their laptops, the audience is greeted by the AI-generated voice of MPR, or Mother Puppet Robot.
Allison Slomowitz
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The Dallas Morning News
This is what a show by the Dallas performance and social justice group Artstillery looks like: a surfeit of seemingly thrown together, often found elements casually coalescing to tell difficult human stories.
In this case, Welcome Mat 2 – People 0, the group’s first production in two years, is concerned with the cost of cultural, religious and political intolerance, especially for children. Besides MPR, there are four puppets representing those least able to defend themselves in war zones around the world.
Allison Slomowitz
/
The Dallas Morning News
“I told my team this has to be about the children,” Artstillery director Ilknur Ozgur says outside the Embarcadero as actors, musicians and technicians prepared for a run-through days before this weekend’s opening. “It’s sad that there are children in hospitals losing limbs to amputation without anesthesia. Children are forgetting how to smile. They’re being shown that only violence is effective. … How do we create an environment where we can forgive one another?”
Artstillery approached that tall task as it always does: by interviewing people with firsthand experience and conducting research online and in historical records. Ozgur has a lot of help gathering material. Many of the Turkish-American’s Oak Cliff-based group’s members have been onboard since she founded Artstillery in 2016, producing shows in partnership with other community and arts organizations.
Allison Slomowitz
/
The Dallas Morning News
They have looked at issues like the West Dallas housing crisis (Family Dollar) and prejudice and discrimination against immigrants and refugees (Dirty Turk). The new piece is a sequel to a 2017 work at Nasher Sculpture Center that brought people of different faiths together to pray.
Artstillery’s immersive approach is messy on purpose. For Ozgur, the process, particularly tapping a wide variety of viewpoints, is as important as the final product. “Artstillery’s goal is to give a voice to people who feel they have none,” reads part of its artistic statement. “Audiences should be more than just spectators.”
Allison Slomowitz
/
The Dallas Morning News
Though the story is sprawling, implying current conflicts in the Middle East, Ukraine, Sudan, Ethiopia and Haiti, Welcome Mat 2 is centered on a family in an unspecified war zone: Prime (Goran Maric), his sister Nur (Lauren Embrey) and his daughter Ary (Elm Whatley).
The casting is unconventional, personal involvement counting as much as professional credentials. Maric is a Bosnian visual artist who fled war-torn Yugoslavia. Embrey is an arts philanthropist whose foundation is one of the project’s funders. Maric and Whatley, 16, are veterans of other Artstillery productions.
Three actors from the South Asian theater troupe DFW Play rotate in the role of a war-zone doctor who has suffered a trauma. Members of the company return near the end of the piece for a succession of meditative dances with Muslim, Hindu, Palestinian and Jewish representatives.
Allison Slomowitz
/
The Dallas Morning News
It takes about 30 people to put on Welcome Mat, Ozgur says. Behind the scenes, she acts as the “sifter” of the gathered material with other members of the Artstillery creative team and directs with Armando Monsivais, a musician, composer, actor and sound designer. The puppets were made by Cynthia Von Orthal in Ozgur’s native Chicago. The origami cranes came from a nonprofit in New Jersey. The budget is about $50,000.
The audience moves instinctually through the long Embarcadero space, sensing where the performers are heading next. A pair of musicians play an ambient score on monochord, gong and beaded percussion instruments. The action peaks at the back of the hall against projected backdrops of a cityscape before and after a devastating attack. When a bomb explodes among realistic-looking puppet-children playing soccer, a young Prime and his cousin Saleh survive but a girl, Alma, does not. Her death is based on the true story of a girl killed by a drone strike.
Allison Slomowitz
/
The Dallas Morning News
“This production is not just a response to current events. It’s a reflection of the fractured state of humanity,” Ozgur explains, citing not just intolerance abroad but also hate crimes here at home. “We’re living in an era where conflict and injustice seems to ripple in every direction. We’re witnessing profound suffering across the globe. As artists, we feel a responsibility to say, ‘We see you,’ and we reject the notion that any one group’s suffering is more valid than another’s.”
Details
Jan. 11-26 at the Embarcadero Building at Fair Park, 3809 Grand Ave. $25. artstillery.org.
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