In a carpenter’s workshop at Portsmouth’s Strawbery Banke Museum, the Leftist Marching Band is smoothing out the rough edges of its Halloween night set list. More than a dozen band members are here on a cold Monday night, crowded around table saws and piles of wood, working out the kinks in the songs they’ll perform at the Portsmouth Halloween Parade the following week — “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” “Evil Ways,” and “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

After a song wraps up, someone asks band leader Elizabeth Wolff about the tempo on “Saints.” “We’ll have to play that part by ear,” she says. And without pause, someone quips, “We play it all by ear!”

The raucous, rag-tag street band is now in its 13th year, and it’s perhaps the busiest one yet. Though the Leftist Marching Band (LMB) has long been a staple at public events throughout the New Hampshire Seacoast, Wolff says 2017 has seen an “above average number of gigs” for the band, especially following the inauguration of a certain social media-obsessed president in January. One of the crowning moments? The Portsmouth edition of the national Women’s March on Jan. 21st, where the LMB played for some 3,500 demonstrators in the middle of Market Square.

“You can feel the collective response of the people around you,” says Wolff, who plays the trombone. “Having 3,500 people show up in Market Square would’ve been awesome anyway, but having the LMB in the middle of it and feeling that collective energy focus and move to a collective rhythm was so powerful.”

Not bad for a band that started in 2004 as a temporary project. Wolff is one of the band’s early members. With the second half of the George W. Bush administration in the offing and the war in Iraq dividing the country, the idea behind the LMB was to inject some energy and fun into the progressive causes. Made up mostly of former high school marching band members, it was a loose, “musically unpracticed” group, Wolff says.

But they tapped into a broader movement. “We didn’t know street bands were a thing,” Wolff says. “The Iraq War really spurred a bunch of street bands, and we were part of that without knowing it.” And while you’ll find the LMB most often in Portsmouth and surrounding locales, you can also see them each year at Somerville’s Honk! Festival, standing alongside other street bands.

Pat Spalding, the band’s majorette, and Wolff are the band’s most visible faces — Wolff at the font of the band, marching, shouting, and waving her trombone in sweeping arcs, usually while barefoot, and Spalding, dancing, twirling, and spinning a baton, usually while wearing a colorful dress.

As the LMB marches into the future, Wolff hopes the band takes more direct action in drawing attention to important local and national causes. The band had a rare victory this year when a New Hampshire court restored access to Sanders Poynt in Rye. The public access point to the beach, Sanders Poynt was closed to the public in 2012 by the nearby Wentworth by the Sea country club. While locals fought the closure in courts, the LMB kept the issue in the spotlight, playing gigs on the beach and raising awareness about the fight.

“What our impact on the outcome was, I doubt it’s a measureable thing. But we had something concrete that we did and the role of the band was really clear, and I’d like to see us do more things like that,” Wolff says.

That spirit of hope is what keeps the band going. “It’s happiness,” Spalding explains. “The music gives you hope, that idea of making joyful noise. That we’re in this together and we’re going to make change.”

Leftist Marching Band – Street Band
Portsmouth, New Hampshire
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All photos by Larry Clow. The video is by Suzanne Laurent.

The post #TakeAction and Make a Joyful Noise appeared first on Take Magazine.

Ask Brandon James to summarize Mad Haus, the performance collective currently curating the Red Light series at the Seacoast Repertory Theatre in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and you’ll get a series of answers as wild and varied as the shows themselves. “Our first show in January was like Burning Man at the end of the world, with time travelers,” he says. “And a little bit Alice in Wonderland. And then we had a Witch-Con show—like Comic-Con, but for witches. It’s sci-fi, time travel, heaven and hell, angels and demons and vampires and witches. And tons of drag queens and freaks.”

But it’s also a “performance portmanteau,” James adds, a hybrid theater experience that brings together a dozen different art forms. Cirque performers and jugglers and musicians and speed painters and puppeteers all come on stage together each month for a performance that happens only once. Add all that together, and you wind up with Mad Haus’ mission statement. “The art and message of Mad Haus is that it’s a big fucking party,” James says, laughing.

It’s a party firmly in its bacchanalian groove. James and partner Ben Hart, who produce shows under the moniker of The Mad Men of Oopsy Daisy Inc!, took over curatorial duties for the Red Light Series in January. In the last eight months, they’ve mashed up genres and aesthetics and technology, and brought a dedicated troupe of artists to Portsmouth, all as part of the Red Light Series’ mission to “keep Portsmouth weird.” The next show takes place Wednesday, Sept. 27 at 8 p.m.

The Mad Haus cast at February’s “Witch-Con” episode. Photo by The Mad Men Of Oopsy Daisy Inc!

Part variety show, part ongoing story, each installment of Mad Haus features a recurring cast of characters involved in interdimensional hijinks and cross-time capers. Backed by a live band and accompanied by cyr wheel artists, jugglers, puppets, among others, the characters live, die, come back to life, and, most of all, sing. Hart and James start writing each Mad Haus production by compiling a playlist of songs; that playlist forms the base of the story, which the actors then flesh out.

Each show is “direct proof magic exists,” James says. “We’re putting these shows together in a matter of days, and somehow, it always works. It’s always beautiful and amazing.”

Ben Hart as The Storyteller. Photo by Ben Bagley

It’s a sort of “organic performance art,” Hart adds, and part of the fun is pushing the artists involved into new areas. “We’ve had people come who are musical theater performers, but they love to paint, and now they’re doing live speed painting on stage every month,” he says.

Hart is originally from New Hampshire, and the two returned to the Seacoast region in 2013 after years of living and performing in New York City. Hart toured with Avenue Q off Broadway for two years, and when they began looking for a change in scenery, the Seacoast hit all their requirements, according to James. “Ben and I left New York City to be involved in this community that is super thriving and rife with art. There’s nowhere else in the country that you have as many theaters and venues and as much live art as we do here,” says James.

Alyssa Dumas as Estelle. Photo by Ben Bagley

That each show happens only once pushes Hart, James, and the rest to take risks, improvise, and let the wild material guide them. “The ephemeral nature of the show is so sexy to me,” James says. “This little universe opens for two hours, and if you were there, you’re the only people who witnessed it.”

The hijinks extend beyond the stage. Audiences are encouraged to come in costume, and many have obliged by dressing up as their favorite character. It’s a chance for performers and audience alike to let their freak-flag fly, Hart says. But it’s more than that. “We strive to show fantastic high art and exciting conceptual art that someone who wants to see something beautiful and moving can access,” he says.

Brandon James, Ben Hart, Mad Haus – Theatrical Company
Portsmouth, New Hampshire
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Top image: Jason Faria as Bonesy. Photo by the Mad Men of Ooopsy Daisy Inc!

The post Keeping it Weird in Portsmouth appeared first on Take Magazine.

Travel along the New Hampshire Seacoast and the odds are good you’ll encounter artist Sam Paolini’s work. Their paintings, full of surreal landscapes populated by adorable-yet-grotesque beasts, odd geometry, and explosive colors, live in local coffee shops, art galleries, skate parks, and dozens of other venues.“(The Seacoast) has been a very encouraging and supportive community,” Paolini says. “We’re lucky to have people in each and every town who are doing similar things and want to lift you up and support you.”

It might seem strange, then, that Paolini’s latest project is set to take them out of New Hampshire and on a months-long road trip. Paolini and her partner, Adam Gouveia, are setting out in September to paint murals in DIY-arts spaces and other community spots throughout the country. They’re calling it Spikepit and SPAO’s Mural Mission, and the first stop is Worcester’s Collective a GoGo on Sept. 18.

“We want to work with DIY spaces and smaller, self-reliant underground organizations and venues,” Paolini explains. Painting murals lets Paolini and Gouveia “work on a bigger scale, and it involves the community more.”

Teatotaller mural in progress, photo by Sam Paolini

Paolini thrives on collaboration. Their own DIY arts collective, Wrong Brain, has evolved in the last decade from a popular zine to an established studio/community space in Dover. The last month has been particularly busy. Art shows at Adelle’s Coffeehouse in Dover and the Portsmouth Music and Arts Center have doubled as fundraisers for the Mural Mission. Meanwhile, they’ve worked on two massive community murals at Teatotaller in Somersworth and the Maybarton Community Garden in Clinton, Mass.

Paolini is stepping away from a leadership role in Wrong Brain. The Mural Mission, they explain, is a chance to shake up their and Gouveia’s art and bring the kind of connections they’ve fostered in New Hampshire to the rest of the country. “I wouldn’t know the difference between how New Hampshire’s influenced my art and any other place, because this is all I’ve known,” Paolini says.

Their mission officially begins on Sept. 16 at the Takedown Music Festival in Strafford, where they’ll create a mural that will double as a stage backdrop. From there, Paolini and Gouveia will hop in their gray Honda Odyssey (nicknamed Odie, after the dog in “Garfield”) loaded with an air mattress and paint supplies, and hit the road. The three-month trip will take them across the country to California; from there, they’ll work their way back to New England through the South. At this writing, they have a painting scheduled at the Aquadome, a non-profit, volunteer-run arts and music venue in Kirksville, Missouri, with venues being considered in Queens and Brooklyn, as well as Lancaster, Ohio.

In true underground spirit, the itinerary is in flux. DIY art spaces are volunteer-run and take years to become established and ironing out a schedule has been challenging. But Gouveia is optimistic. “I think once we get on the road, we’re going to run into all these situations we couldn’t plan for,” he says.

Sam Paolini-artist, Wrong Brain Mural Mission
Dover, New Hampshire
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Wrong Brain
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Top image, Pyramidscape (cropped), photo by Sam Paolini

The post Have Van, Will Paint appeared first on Take Magazine.