Trampoline Hall : Now and Forever (Sunday, September 21, at the Marquee)
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Trampoline Hall : Now and Forever
(Sunday, September 21, at the Marquee)
Now in it sixth month, New York's favorite boozy lecture series, Trampoline Hall, jets in from its
Toronto birthplace to stage another guerilla attack on the art of conversation.
Trampoline Hall has been delighting sold-out crowds in a Toronto nightclub once a month since
Dec. 2001, and was a smash hit on its 10-city U.S. tour in Nov. 2002. Since April 1, New York has
had its own, parallel Trampoline Hall series, popping up monthly in venues around Manhattan.
Trampoline Hall is a bastard hybrid of literary salon and reality TV: Each evening features three
people giving short talks on subjects they're not experts in -- whether private obsessions and
passions, or crackpot theories dreamed up on a whim. These inspired amateurs stammer and sweat
their way through the talks, ambushing listeners with obscure knowledge, absurd leaps of logic
and, often, moving personal insights. Topics have included a plan to rid the world of small talk
forever, the number 32, the wave of female poisoners in 18th-century France, and the emotional
implications of infinity.
Host Misha Glouberman, "a man known for wrinkled suits and a taste for improv" (The New
Yorker), encourages the audience to ask intrusive questions, and discussion erupts. The ultimate
effect is "in the tradition of dime-store raconteurs and pseudo-scientific humbug" (Creative
Loafing, Atlanta), all happening in "the space between a party and a show" (Eye weekly).
Afterwards, much of the audience sticks around to keep debating long into the night.
The series was created by Sheila Heti, one of Canada's most exciting young writers, whose stories
"force us to see ourselves and others in startling new ways" (Interview magazine). November's
Trampoline Hall tour, which introduced the Toronto team to speakers and standing-room-only
nightclubs and galleries from Boston to Atlanta to Chicago, coincided with the U.S. release of
Heti's debut fiction collection, The Middle Stories (published here by McSweeney's). The New
York series is that tour's ongoing sequel, even as the original Trampoline Hall continues in
Toronto, where it's been profiled in the major daily and weekly papers, and on radio, television
and the Web.
This month's Hall is guest-curated by Lisa Kahlden, with set design by Leanne Shapton. It takes
place at The Marquee, 356 Bowery, Sunday September 21. Doors at 7:30, show at 8:00 sharp,
admission $6.50.
For photos and an electronic press kit, please visit http://www.trampolinehall.net/press/
For more information, or to arrange an interview with Misha or Sheila, send an email to
media@trampolinehall.net or call 416-535-5153.
What People Are Saying abut Trampoline Hall
"Eccentricity and do-it-yourself inventiveness"
The New Yorker
"Like Mark Twain fronting the Ramones… A good time is had by all…America will
welcome them with open arms."
Philadelphia Weekly
"Unruly… Caustically Funny"
Durham Independent
"Curious? You should be"
The Loyola Phoenix, Chicago
"Almost transcendent… a glorious mix of private preoccupations and arcane information."
Louisville Courier-Journal
"Inventive Whimsy…Eccentric free-form inventiveness… In the tradition of dime-store
raconteurs and Pseudo-scientific Humbug "
Creative Loafing Atlanta
"Funny… Boozy… The Place To Be"
National Post, Canada
"The Space Between a party and a show: Offbeat salon packs them in"
Headline from Eye Weekly, Toronto
"Cloud-splitting Genius"
Lola Magazine
What Kinds of Things Happen at Trampoline Hall? Trampoline Hall is indescribably different from one show to the next. Here are some things we have done at Trampoline Hall: Three young men talked about their visions of utopia while their mothers sat on stage and listened. After the lectures, audience members could ask each young man about his image of a perfect world, or could ask his mother about him. A dozen people all spoke about our friend Patrick Roscoe. We had a private eye follow him around town and report his findings. An ex-girlfriend spoke about their relationship. A journalist gave three possible obituaries. A psychoanalyst met with Patrick and went on at length about the nature of human failure, annoying Patrick and moving the audience to tears (really) until Misha cut the lecture short. We staged a What Is Beauty? Pageant with judges and singing and costume changes. Eleven participants competed for the title of Miss Trampoline Hall, each lecturing on the subject of their own beauty. The winner was the only contestant who wore a swimsuit. We served boiled chicken on Yom Kippur – Misha’s first time ever cooking. We ran a Lending Library. Between acts, the audience was invited onto the stage to lend things to other people – one fellow lent his friendship, but the friendship laid around the house till it had to be returned. Then Sheila got sick of it and now the library is closed. Matt talked about the number 32. Julia talked about hating God. Sheila's father talked about his liver transplant. Steve believed that the discovery of the dinosaur fish, the coelacanth, amounted to a call for the overthrow of the capitalist state. He had great slides of himself leaping up in front of a brick wall with the large words COELACANTH on it, and another one of him sleeping under the large word COELACANTH cut out of paper. There was a silent lecture by Matias which was very stirring. In Washington a lecturer came in disguise, and lectured about her own romantic life. In Durham, a lecturer was called out of town in a last minute emergency: We had a stranger read her lecture, and then she answered questions by phone. At Galapagos in Brooklyn, Jorge Just debated indefensible points against people better qualified than himself, and won anyhow.
Sheila Heti is a Toronto-based writer. She writes about art for various Canadian publications. She is the author of The Middle Stories, a collection of short stories published in Canada by Anansi Press, and in the United States by McSweeney's. Heti's characters are sex-addled, self-absorbed, or sorrowful figures at loose ends on city streets, except when they are giants, princesses, and monkeys at loose ends in villages or on boats. She is now at work on a novel, as well as a musical for Toronto's Nightwood Theatre, designed by artist Marcel Dzama with songs by Daniel Bejar of indie-rock bands Destroyer and The New Pornographers. Misha Glouberman is the host of Trampoline Hall. He is an improv theatre teacher who can't stand improv shows. As a result, he teaches improv only to non-performers, recently working with office workers, very bad teenagers, deaf kids, opera students, and anarchist squatters. He's fascinated with parlour games, and has thrown enormous parties with free drinks and free haircuts. Most recently, Misha has been teaching courses in non-idiomatic improvised vocal noise music, to a mix of musicians and non-musicians. Sheila and Carl met Misha at a party.
The New Yorker, November 18, 2002
CONTENTS
Latest issue eye - 10.24.02
This issue
LISTINGS
Movie showtimes
The space between a party and a show
Music listings
Theatre
Dance Offbeat salon packs them in
Comedy
Galleries
Spoken word
Etc.
TRAMPOLINE HALL
COLUMNS
Featuring lectures by Jenny Armour, Matias Rozenberg and someone
Love Bites
named Gus. Curated by Sheila Heti. Hosted by Misha Glouberman. Oct 28,
Feelings
8pm. $5. Cameron House, 408 Queen W. 416-364-0811.
Pink Panther
www.trampolinehall.net.
Sign Language
CONTRIBUTORS
CLASSIFIEDS BY EDWARD KEENAN
ABOUT EYE
During last month's standing-room-
only Trampoline Hall event in the
smoky backroom of the Cameron
House, Toronto author John Stiles
delivered a lecture on the subject of
apple-picking in the Annapolis Valley,
a Royal Bank employee named Ruby
King gave a talk about life as a temp,
and Steve Kado used a slide show to
try to explain how the rediscovery of
the coelacanth (a dino-fish once
thought extinct) should incite people
to "hit a pig [that is, a police officer]
over the head with a beer bottle filled
with cement" in the name of striking
down liberal democracy.
During breaks, Trampoline Hall
creator Sheila Heti and host Misha
Glouberman served boiled chicken
and broth out of a pot at the back of
the stage. And at one point during the
night, a woman from the audience
displayed photographs she took of a
boxing-nun puppet (which she
borrowed from an audience member
at a previous Trampoline Hall)
punching the Parthenon.
The bill of events is obviously
eccentric, but there's a successful
formula behind Trampoline Hall's
madness. The monthly lecture series
has become the place to be for a
certain subset of Toronto's youngish
literary crowd since it was first held last December. The boozy events, which Glouberman
describes as "playing in the spaces between a party and a show," have attracted standing-room
audiences every month, often with people lining up outside the door.Typically, three performers lecture on topics of personal rather than professional interest, then
take questions from the audience. Most of the speakers are not polished performers, which suits
Heti just fine. "Trampoline Hall has a neat messiness, a muddiness. There are accidents," she
says. "Misha and I say that, in a way, every night is a failure."
Heti is the 25-year-old author of The Middle Stories, a book of fairy tale-like stories published to
near-uniformly ecstatic reviews last year. In person, Heti looks much like her prose reads: she's
small in a way that seems more precise than delicate. Her bangs are cut blunt across her
forehead, her eyes wide, her skin pale. Within moments of meeting you, she will almost certainly
ask to bum a cigarette.
Heti founded Trampoline Hall after attending a lecture and slide show by New York comic-strip
artist Ben Katchor a year ago at the University of Calgary. The student audience at Katchor's
lecture was, she says, "not engaged, they were talking or passing notes," but Heti was inspired
by the unconscious theatricality of the lecture. "I wanted to bring that back to Toronto. To do
something that would involve people without being collaborative," she says. Collaborations, she
says, have a tendency to mediocrity. "You wind up with half an idea."
Lectures in the series have ranged from what many found a surprisingly insightful discussion of
the number 32 by actor/writer/director Matthew MacFadzean, to the absurd, as when journalist
Chris Turner's factual account of India and his travels in it progressed into an outright lie,
alleging that pens are the objects of cult worship there. Another night was devoted exclusively to
a discussion of Patrick Roscoe -- not the author but a computer-programmer friend of Heti's.
Glouberman says the eclectic nature of the events is a reflection of Heti. "Sheila has such a
powerful aesthetic and sensibility, and that sensibility is there in every aspect of the show." It
certainly informed the What Is Beauty pageant held in May, when seven female and four male
contestants ("each more beautiful than the next," Glouberman announced) vied for an oversized
cheque for $200 and the title of Miss Trampoline Hall.
The next lecture (Oct. 28) will be your last chance to catch Trampoline Hall in Toronto for a
while. They're taking the show on the road for much of November, getting back into town in time
for the regularly scheduled December edition. The Middle Stories is being released in the U.S.
next month by McSweeney's, the burgeoning publishing empire built by po-mo superstar Dave
Eggers. (The Anansi paperback edition was released in Canada Oct. 1.) Heti and Glouberman are
working with McSweeney's to stage Trampoline Hall events in 10 American cities.
Glouberman says he isn't sure how well Trampoline Hall will travel. "I often say the series is the
sum of its mistakes," he says. "Everything we've done has been based on terrible ideas. First
Sheila comes and says she wants to start a lecture series, which is a terrible idea. Then she
wants to hold a beauty pageant, which is an even more terrible idea. Now the tour with
McSweeney's might be the most terrible idea so far."
Heti spent the past several months working with the McSweeney's crew to line up lecturers and
venues (she typed "interesting people" and "Louisville" into a search engine to find one speaker),
and McSweeney's has flexed its muscle within the geek-lit crowd to promote the tour.
McSweeney's and Trampoline Hall seem to share a penchant for successful chaos. Heti's book,
for example, was printed in Iceland and missed the boat to Boston, so its release date had to be
postponed. "With big organizations ... you don't miss the boat with your book. This is more
lifelike. It's truer," she says, comparing their casusal subversiveness to the polished, plastic
artifice of mainstream entertainment. "It's not like we're a reaction to the artifice, it's that the
artifice is a reaction to the other. The messiness is not going to go away."
Printer-friendly version | Respond to this article: Write a letter to the editor
Top. © 1991-2002 eye - webmaster@eye.netThe Talking Trampoline
Sheila Heti's recipe for her McSweeney's book
tour: Get three people to stand up in a bar and
speak on subjects they don't know about.
BY FIONA MORGAN
Book tours are boring. That's why author Sheila Heti came up with something
different.
November 13, 2002 She'd been hosting a lecture series--with a twist--
A R T S F E A T U R E at Cameron House, a historic Toronto bar. In the
"Trampoline Hall Lectures," people speak about
arcane or silly topics they're not experts on--in front of an audience free to
smoke, drink and throw out unruly questions.
Photo By Derek Shapton
Trampoline Hall host Misha Glouberman and author
Sheila Heti
When McSweeney's agreed to publish the American version of her book of
short fiction, The Middle Stories, she decided to take the show on the road.
Trampoline Hall comes to Durham, Nov. 18. As in all the other dates, three
local speakers will join her. Sarah Hand will talk about how people who eat
pie versus cake correlate with people who like algebra versus geometry. Luis
Velasco will report on the quiñceanera, the Latin cultural celebration of a
girl's 15th birthday, and Shawn Marie Bryan will actually fly in to discuss the
name Julia in pop songs.
Like much of the writing from McSweeney's, Heti's style is precise, absurd
and caustically funny. McSweeney's decision to back an American version
continues what has become a grand experiment in book publication. Recently,
founder Dave Eggers made big news by making You Shall Know Our
Velocity, his new novel, available only at independent bookstores and on the
McSweeney's Web site.Why are the lecturers not experts on their topic? Part of the reason this works is that the audience feels like they can relate to the lecturer: This isn't a famous author, it isn't somebody who knows a lot and is very impressive. They're doing what you could conceivably do. It gets people to think about things in the corner of their minds they haven't explored. What's interesting is seeing people expose themselves or their oddities, something you don't normally get when you meet somebody. The questions and answers usually end up as long as the lecture; it's when the show tends to come alive in a different way. I read that people have spoken on the number 32, historical things and strange phenomena. But I saw that the history of the dildo was off limits. Why? I don't want people to talk about things you might read an article about in a magazine. That's a weird thing to say because you can write an article about anything. But didn't you think [the dildo lecture] sounded like a magazine article? I don't ask to see the lectures beforehand. I don't want to control them in any way. That's the interesting thing about theater, which this is in a lot of ways: Accidents can happen, and there's room for things that are completely unexpected. Misha Glouberman, our host, used to throw all of these parlor game parties. He's really interested in the idea of what a party is, why people go to them, and in games. So the shows feel like a parlor game sometimes. You've done other things with Trampoline Hall besides lectures. You had a "What Is Beauty?" Pageant in Toronto, right? We had it in the middle of summer on this huge back patio: a dozen or so different contestants, mostly women, but four men I think. We had six judges. One woman, an image consultant, I got out of the phone book. Someone else was a professor of aesthetics from the university. They were experts on beauty in various ways. I had the contestants leave breakup messages on my answering machine, and we played them during their initial strut. Basically they were breaking up with the audience. I like the idea that as soon as you see their beauty, they're breaking up with you. They're unattainable. That's right, the cruelty of beauty. And they all did their talent at the same time, because the talent competition is so tedious. One person peeled an orange, another was knitting in a corner, another played the flute, while another was reciting poetry. It was this great cacophony. It went on late into the night and we all got quite drunk. It seems a risk to take Trampoline Hall on the road. There's a strong audience in Toronto, but you don't know what's going to happen when you get to Durham, Atlanta or Brooklyn. We're a little bit nervous. Part of the reason this works in Toronto is because it's packed with people and it's turning into some kind of community. There's also this continuity that energizes it: It's going to happen next month and the month after, so anyone from the audience can do a lecture next time. That's not going to happen on the road, so it's a totally different thing.
Are you imaging that it might take off? That after you leave there might be
another event like this?
It never occurred to me that that could happen, but it would be great if it did.
It's a very easy thing to put together.
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