Ask locals about Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and you could hear anything. Old-timers are most likely to complain, either about that one mayor who went to jail or the PawSox. (The owners of Boston’s AAA baseball team have been threatening to skip town for years.) But you’ll also hear praise. Industrious shoppers will tell you about the latest deals they got amid the stationery aisles at Paperworks, or the two stories of material up for grabs at Lorraine Fabrics.

Foodies will recommend the Pawtucket Wintertime Farmers Market, set up each Saturday morning in Hope Artiste Village—a giant mall full of specialty stores . . . sort of. (It’s also a wedding venue, a bowling alley, and lots of other things.)

“I’m here largely because of the building,” says Kent Stetson, a designer of brightly printed handbags and leather goods. Hope Artiste Village has been his showroom and production facility for nearly four years, and it’s representative of the city’s mill studio culture. “If I’m here working at four in the morning, someone else will also be in the building working. There’s a 24-hour entrepreneurial spirit.”

Once home to a thriving textile industry, Pawtucket’s abandoned mills, like those in many other cities across New England, became prime real estate for artists in need of studios. The mills also attracted brewmasters who needed storage space. The Bucket, once a disparaging nickname for Pawtucket, now has a namesake in Bucket Brewery, a popular craft brewery—one of several in the city.

Another Pawtucket perk: low rents and large immigrant populations make it a great destination for culinary adventures on a budget. Within city limits, you can find everything from Venezuelan arepas to Szechuan dan dan noodles. The city’s Cape Verdean population is the country’s second largest, with one in eight residents claiming ancestry from Cape Verde’s ten tropical islands. Try unique culinary gems like cachupa, a slow-cooked, rustic meat stew that’s available for breakfast at Monte Cara. (It’s served with a side of linguica.) On the other side of town, 10 Rocks serves grilled octopus with plantains, plus empanada-like fried pastels (pronounced POSH-tels) with tuna or native cod.

Spend Friday nights in Pawtucket at the Ratskeller in the German American Cultural Society. Located on a side street in the middle of nowhere, the club’s basement beer hall opens to the public once a week for pretzels, schnitzel, and cucumber salad. The food is cheap, the foosball table free, and the beer freely—well, cheaply—flowing. If you’re there on the right night, you may even catch an elderly gentleman playing the accordion.

Illustration by Peter O. Zierlein

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“They’re just kind of hideous,” artist Jill Colinan says when asked to describe the pieces in her latest show. It’s an unusual description for someone discussing her own work, but it’s also pretty accurate. Colinan makes fabric dolls with crooked smiles, garish makeup, and lumpy bodies that oddly render them more human than anything you’ll find in a toy store.

“People think they’re funny,” she says. “Well, at first people say ‘Oh, they’re so scary.’ But people mix up ugly and scary, and think they’re the same thing.”

Colinan’s work was recently on display in Ruins, a two-person exhibition with fellow Providence artist Jen Corace. Colinan took the show title literally, placing dolls in rooms with fabric walls and rusty metal jewelry findings. “I was looking at Roman ruins and idols, and I thought it would be interesting to show the buried lost part of a wall, but a wall from the early twentieth century,” she says.

Colinan has been producing dolls for over 20 years. “Some of the older dolls were eaten by mice at my old studio,” she says. “I opened a drawer and their bodies were totally flat and ripped apart.” At the time she stuffed them with rice. Now she’s moved on to tiny beads, the kind used to stuff Beanie Babies. “I cut the heads off and make new bodies,” she says matter-of-factly. She’s been revisiting the older pieces lately.

Mounted to the gallery walls, the dolls were roughly the same height as Barbie dolls—“I’ll defend Barbies until the end of time,” she declares—but otherwise couldn’t be more different. Bandaged hands and graying hair suggest that these dolls have more interesting back stories than Barbie’s plastic perfection.

Colinan says that each begins with something physical, a particular fabric or a combination of colors, possibly something she found on a shopping mission. She visits estate sales and immediately scouts out the basement workshops and the sewing boxes for rusty metal and notions. Once she lucked out and happened upon an estate sale from a doll maker.

“It was everything I love under one dark, dusty roof,” she says. “I felt a real Grey Gardens kinship with him. I got his pin cushion and made a doll. I left the pins exactly how he left them. I used fabric from his collection. I cut off the head from another doll and Frankensteined it on.”

“Do you know ‘Underground,’ the Tom Waits song? ‘They’re alive, they’re awake / While the rest of the world is asleep.’ That’s how I think of them existing—after hours, after the normal people have gone.”

Jill Colinan–artist
Providence, Rhode Island
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Top image: Detail of a Jill Colinan doll. Photo by Scott Lapham.

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House of Cach jewelry made with real cicadas. Photo by Ian Travis Barnard

The inventive Providence, Rhode Island, accessories company House of Cach makes wearable art from cicadas, starfish, and bullet casings, among other items. Their smaller pieces include some that border on traditional, such as black leather cuffs and crystal drop earrings. But the larger works—such as a large gold chest plate made of cicadas—are quite polarizing. “People either say it’s really beautiful, or that it’s the most disgusting thing they’ve ever seen,” says company cofounder Alexa Cach, quite happy with either response. “We want people to feel something when they look at our pieces.”

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Mathewson Street United Methodist Church is one of many religious buildings entrenched in the fabric of downtown Providence, Rhode Island. Located on a transitional block, the church faces a row of empty storefronts, one of which bears a sign promising that the long-shuttered Chinese restaurant Dragon 2000 will someday reopen as a gay nightclub called Dragon. The church building is notable from the outside for the huge mural adorning its left side: a man in a pineapple-and-pizza-print shirt tossing some sort of ring in the air. A mouse loiters by his ear.

While passers-by should be forgiven for ignoring the posted church bulletins, it’s immediately clear that something different is going on here. And it is: the church’s top floor features a 1,300-square-foot black box theater. It’s also the home of OUT LOUD Theatre, one of Rhode Island’s most forward-thinking theater companies.

Kira Hawridge. Photo by Ian Travis Barnard

Kira Hawkridge founded OUT LOUD five years ago after graduating from the University of Rhode Island. A Pawtucket native, Hawkridge has a theatrical pedigree. Her parents are local theater vets who ran NewGate Theatre, a company that 20 years ago performed in the same church where OUT LOUD performs today. “I grew up in that building,” Hawkridge says.

Is it unusual for a theater artist to start her own company immediately after college? Perhaps. But OUT LOUD is not a normal company. “It’s a lab environment,” Hawkridge describes, “and a support system for artists who are well versed in craft, in doing and observing.” More specifically, OUT LOUD is a company that’s increasingly centered on movement. Not dance per se, but the physicality of performers who aren’t formally trained in dance.

The company’s three annual productions are always united by a common theme. Two years ago, for instance, the season focused on the public domain—plays were performed for free by volunteer actors, with no money allotted for sets, costumes, or performance rights. (They did Antigone, Dracula, and Coriolanus.)

Ottavia De Luca as The Woman in The Yellow Wallpaper (2017). Photo by Piquant Photo

Last summer, the company presented an original adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892
feminist classic, The Yellow Wallpaper. Performed with minimal dialogue, the Victorian-era chronicle of postpartum depression was told in four parts over four consecutive nights, with a different actor playing the unnamed woman each night. Before each show, audience members rode up the church’s jaunty, nautical-themed elevator (which features a plaque dedicated to the elevator operator who used to run it). They were then handed cups of water and shuffled into a makeshift doctor’s waiting room, complete with copies of Highlights magazine, to wait for the show to begin.

“The Yellow Wallpaper was our first experiment in physicalizing a preexisting story,” explains Hawkridge. “It was a yearlong process.” The four nearly silent pieces were each brief but powerful, with each performer revolving around the stage in choreographed dissonance, reflecting the main character’s inner turmoil.

Hawkridge won’t take credit for the adaptation. “It was a collaborative process, so I don’t consider myself the writer,” she says. “I’m more of a guide for people to find things already in themselves. That dynamic seems more truthful than saying I’m the writer that adapted the story. The group is very gracious with vision.”

Natasha Cole as Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade (2017). Photo by Piquant Photo

Reviews were overwhelmingly positive. “We’re always in the mode of asking how we can be more effective,” she explains. “With The Yellow Wallpaper, we ask how it can be stronger. It can always grow. With Marat/Sade, we did it and put it to bed.” Marat/Sade was their spring show, and their largest to date. The cast featured 17 actors, plus a piano player and a stage manager who were both incorporated into the show. Peter Weiss’s 1963 play, set in a nineteenth-century mental hospital, is epic in every way. (Even the full title is overwhelming: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.)

“We do themed seasons,” Hawkridge says, “so the audience grows and changes. We’ve built up a core subscriber base, who go for our approach to each theme rather than the theme itself.” Season five’s theme was madness, and it wrapped up in November with a production of Shakespeare’s King Lear. She cast Alan Hawkridge, her father, as Shakespeare’s ruler, driven to madness by his daughters.

“I love working with my dad,” she admits. “We’ve always had an easy, collaborative process, and we also challenge each other in creative ways. Obviously I’m biased because he’s my dad, but he’s a great actor. He connects you on a journey with each character.” Both Hawkridge and her father wanted to emphasize the mental aspects of the play. “The focus is zoning in on Lear’s mind, bringing the audience into his madness. The language is so viscerally potent.” And again, the play will feature a lot of movement. “The idea is to digest Shakespeare’s language, absorb it, and translate it into physical language,” she states.

Kira’s father, Alan Hawkridge, in King Lear (2017). Photo by Piquant Photo

OUT LOUD appeared at a time when a number of theaters popped up more or less simultaneously in Rhode Island, like Epic Theatre Company, Contemporary Theater Company, and Burbage Theatre Company. The artistic directors are all friendly and frequently work together. Hawkridge, for instance, regularly directs shows at Epic Theatre Company, adding her own personal touches. “It’s a part of how I tell stories,” she says, describing why she incorporates signature elements of her own work into productions she stages for other companies. For example, when Epic Theatre Company brought her in for Tennessee Williams’s saucy Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, she left the lead character on stage for the whole show, drunk and passed out on the floor when he wasn’t called on to act. The play’s two halves each opened with a wordless group dance.

Unlike most companies, OUT LOUD works its season around a calendar year, rather than the traditional fall/spring season. “That actually started because a lot of our company members were still in school,” Hawkridge recalls. “So people had summers free.”

At this point, there are six main ensemble members. “This is the smallest ensemble that we’ve worked with,” she says. “By design.” Season six, the 2018 season, focuses on collaboration and the specificity of collectively creating material. After a year of studying mental illness, this season will be a lot brighter. “This season’s going to be light and joyous, with elements of fantasy and unreality.”

Well, mostly. Escape is an original piece about the grief a woman experiences when her twin brother dies. “This is really influenced by the core ensemble wanting to explore the specificity of grief,” Hawkridge explains. “It’s about finding joy after trauma. We began with the subject of twins and let it ripple out from there.” Escape was conceived by Hawkridge and she will direct it, but it will be choreographed collectively by the ensemble. The play features a woman and the ghost of her brother, as well as surrounding figures (a partner, a mother, a therapist). There will be little to no dialogue.

Beth Alianiello in King Lear (2017). Photo by Piquant Photo

The two other shows of the sixth season will be more familiar to theatergoers: Wonder is inspired by Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books—that one will be “interactive and sensory,” according to Hawkridge. Dream is an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Unusually, they’re performing the entire season at once. After six solid months of rehearsals, all three shows will be performed in June 2018. That’s a busy time for the arts in Providence: PVDFest covers the downtown area the first weekend of the month, and two weeks later, the city will be overtaken by a nighttime Pride parade. It’s a shining moment for the downtown, specifically right around Mathewson Street, and Hawkridge hopes OUT LOUD will add to the momentum.

Kira Hawkridge–founder OUT LOUD THEATRE
Providence, Rhode Island
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Top image: Sarah Leach as The Woman in The Yellow Wallpaper (2017). Photo by Piquant Photo

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Kevin Broccoli might be the busiest person in New England. The 33-year-old Rhode Island native writes, acts, directs, and works as artistic director of the ambitiously titled Epic Theatre Company.

“Epic is a small—very small—company that focuses on work that is story-driven,” says Broccoli. (Yes, his name is pronounced like the vegetable.) With minimal sets and barely any costume budget, Epic is about to kick off its sixth full season, one that features a whopping ten shows over ten months.

Kevin Broccoli, image courtesy of the actor

The season includes Red Speedo, Lucas Hnath’s 2013 drama about Olympic hopefuls and performance enhancing drugs. Set at an actual swimming pool, the play will be performed poolside at the Pawtucket Boys & Girls Club. Another highlight is season closer Wolf Hall, based on Hilary Mantel’s historical epic, which will be staged in a large warehouse with a cast of 35 actors.

“People are disillusioned with theatre right now,” Broccoli says. “People like Netflix. I can’t blame them, I like Netflix too.” That’s why he selects plays that will make people sit up and pay attention, plays he hopes will provoke strong reactions.

Broccoli also acts and writes, in addition to working days in his hometown public library. “I usually start writing at midnight and go until 3 a.m. I revise during the day, but I write late at night. If a first draft takes longer than a week I’m not going to finish it.” Epic just wrapped up a world premiere run of Dorothy, Rose, Sophia and Blanche, a comedy about four women who wake up to find themselves cast in a reboot of The Golden Girls. “People thought we were just doing scenes from The Golden Girls,” he says.

Broccoli’s summer has been dominated by a legal kerfuffle related to another of his plays. James Franco and Me is a two-man show where a character named Kevin Broccoli meets the actor James Franco in a hospital waiting room as Broccoli’s father lies dying nearby. It premiered last fall in a predictably quirky way: Broccoli played himself and a different actor played Franco every night.

James Franco and Me was successful enough that it a second staging was scheduled in New York, now with two actors playing Broccoli and two others playing Franco. “We planned a three-performance run, and it was all good to go until the venue got a cease-and-desist letter from Franco’s lawyers,” Broccoli says. The venue bailed, so Broccoli wrote a strongly worded press release. Within days, the news was featured everywhere from Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly to People.com and the New York Times.

The biggest surprise to Broccoli is that the letter didn’t come earlier. “We did the show 30 times in Rhode Island,” he says. “They didn’t care; they thought it didn’t matter. Judging by the letter, they only cared because we were bringing it to New York.”

Broccoli says he reached out to Franco’s agent, publicist, and even an ex-girlfriend, but hasn’t yet reached the actor himself. How could Franco, a RISD graduate, disapprove of the show when so much of his own work mines the same material?

Earlier this month Broccoli performed a reworked, redacted version of the show in Rhode Island for one night only. _______ and Me removed all references to the actor. “Who knows,” Broccoli said before the altered show debuted. “It might be funnier that way.”

Kevin Broccoli–actor/writer/artistic director, Epic Theatre Company
Providence, Rhode Island
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Top image from Dorothy, Rose, Sophia and Blanche, image courtesy of Kevin Broccoli

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East Greenwich is a scenic coastal Rhode Island town with a lively restaurant scene and plenty of waterfront bars, but it’s not the most obvious destination for live music. At least it wasn’t until the newly rejuvenated Greenwich Odeum began regularly hosting live music acts. The venue aims to host an estimated 70 events this year even as it undergoes a major facelift.

The Odeum first opened its doors in 1926 as a vaudeville theater. Like many such venues, it transitioned from vaudeville into a movie house, which is remained for 60 years until it was finally crushed by the home video market. Now it’s back.

Newly-renovated Greenwich Odeum lobby

This year it’s been selected as one of two host venues for the Rhode Island Music Hall of Fame induction concerts. Rock bands, including Throwing Muses and Neutral Nation, will perform later this month at The Met in Pawtucket, while jazz and R&B performers will play the Odeum.

This year’s honorees include drummer Artie Cabral, who has been performing since the 1950s. He was resident drummer at the famed Celebrity Club, the first racially integrated nightclub in New England. He still performs regularly. Fellow inductees Dan Moretti, Billy Osborne, and Frank Potenza will share the stage on April 23rd.

“We’re trying to expand out breadth with more than just rock concerts,” says Odeum board president Dan Speca. Comedy is increasingly popular—comedian Jim Breuer is appearing in May, and twice now the Odeum’s hosted the original cast of cult TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000.

As a seated venue, the Odeum tends to draw a local 35+ crowd, according to Speca. But when Partridge Family star David Cassidy performed his penultimate concert at the Odeum last month, fans came from as far away as Mississippi.

Speca joined the Odeum board in 2014 and became its president last year. He likens the venue’s renovation process to a startup: taking small steps and constantly analyzing financial risk.

The Odeum currently has one full-time employee, who handles everything from production management to box office duties, as well as a handful of part-time staff and active board participation. “I was in there last night changing light bulbs,” Speca laughs.

With capital grants from philanthropic foundations and the state arts council, the interior was revitalized last year—“a total gut job,” according to Speca—for the first time in half a century.

This summer, newly installed sprinklers will allow the Odeum to increase capacity and serve alcohol. They’ll close for a few weeks and reopen in time for the Rhode Island International Film Festival in August. With its 25-foot long screen, the Odeum has been restored to its cinematic heyday.

“Summer is a good time to close,” Speca says. “Acts aren’t touring as much, and people are at the beach.” Next summer they’re hoping to install a lift, which will lead event attendees to a new 98-seat balcony.

What’s next for the Odeum? Upcoming headliners include Todd Rundgren (that show is sold out) and “musician’s musician” Graham Parker, plus ’60s girl group stars Mary Wilson (of the Supremes) and Darlene Love (of the Crystals). Let the good times roll.

Dan Speca, president of the board
Greenwich Odeum
East Greenwich, Rhode Island
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This August, Strange Attractor has a new pageant planned that includes gathering 100 singers on Easton’s Beach in Newport for a choral performance. Their audience? The sea itself. The occasion? A rather remarkable solar eclipse. The pageant begins as the moon begins its creep between the Earth and the sun, and the performance continues for the duration of the eclipse, about two hours.

Those of us in New England will only see a partial eclipse on August 21, but it’s the first total eclipse since 1918 that will stretch across the entire United States. The sun’s rays will be totally blocked from central Oregon to South Carolina. If it’s not too cloudy, the whole sky will be sunset-colored, even in the Northeast.

Pageant rehearsals have just begun, and most details are still being ironed out, but Strange Attractor organizers Rebecca Noon and Jed Hancock-Brainerd have some guidelines for what the event will be. “The only criteria for performers is that people have feelings about the ocean,” Hancock-Brainerd says, “since the audience is the ocean.” Adds Noon, “We only want things that the ocean wants. No confetti, no plastic, and no stepping on the dune grass.”

Hancock-Brainerd originally conceived the sea pageant, explaining that 100 participants seemed like a good number for the event. “It’s more reasonable than a thousand,” he says.

Noon and Hancock-Brainerd are half of Strange Attractor, a company that’s split between Rhode Island, Philadelphia and Juneau. The four Americans met in graduate school in London, and each member uses the Strange Attractor moniker for projects that involve one or more of the other members.

“Usually Jed dreams up an idea that’s totally crazy,” explains Noon, who handles directing and producing duties, “and I say, ‘No, I’m not going to do that.’ And then some time goes by and we start to develop it.” This is the fourth show in seven years that the two have conceived in this way.

The pair are currently wrapping up a year-long residency at the Providence Athenaeum, where they researched the complicated historical relationship between Rhode Islanders and the ocean. They’ve also been learning more about the ocean itself and about remarkable eclipses.

Strange Attractor’s most recent piece, Sans Everything, was performed in Providence and Boston before showing this February at Philadelphia’s FringeArts. Conceived by Aram Aghazarian–Strange Attractor’s Philly member–and directed by Noon, the show imagines a post-human future where artificial intelligence units are compelled by outside forces to perform Shakespeare as they travel through space.

Roblin Davis, Aram Aghazarian, Rebecca Noon and Jed Hancock-Brainerd, A Terrific Fire, photo by Shea’la Finch

That’s actually one of the group’s more traditional offerings. Their Rhode Island events have included a gothic Christmas pageant staged in the middle of July at the home that Hancock-Brainerd and Noon share. Another performance required audience members to wear sweatpants and sing on the street. Entitled Before We Begin, that show included a lengthy introduction after which the duo put paper bags over their heads, allowing uncomfortable audience members to leave without being seen.

The sea pageant is a one-time event, but a reprisal may be possible: it’s only seven years before the next total solar eclipse.

Rebecca Noon and Jed Hancock-Brainerd–founders, Strange Attractor
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Top Image: Before We Begin: Jed Hancock-Brainerd and Rebecca Noon, photo by Stray Creatives

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It’s been three years since composer James Falzone created the Providence Research Ensemble, but he still has trouble categorizing the group. They’re not classical, he says, because they don’t really play classical music. Experimental doesn’t quite sound right, either, although some of their performances certainly sound that way.

“I write systems-based music,” he says, before jovially launching into specifics about structure, mathematics, and how his compositions are adaptable depending on which players are in the room. “There’s actually something called Systems Music, but that’s really a British thing and we’re not that, either.” He settles on New Music, a term generally applied to the border-pushing fringes of contemporary classical composition.

As the name suggests, Providence Research Ensemble is largely a lab for Falzone to figure out his own work. “What’s wonderful about the group,” he says, “is that it’s friends of mine coming together in an informal, convivial way to perform music that might not otherwise be performed.” He loves the performance side of music, which isn’t the case for many composers.

“It’s so easy to sound overblown,” Falzone says, laughing. “There’s nothing I hate more than the image of the composer that comes from romantic music. I like some of the music, but that tortured genius image…”

In 2016, Falzone was awarded one of the RISD Museum’s inaugural fellowships, a paid honor that allowed him to research museum collections and also perform regularly in its grand European painting gallery. (One memorably odd performance featured cello, trombone, two basses, and Falzone on an electroacoustic instrument called the Cembaphon.)

Hardly tortured, Falzone has reason to be happy. He’s just been accepted into a graduate program. He hasn’t formally accepted yet, but it seems likely that a move might be coming soon. But while Falzone may leave Providence, he’ll remain involved in music around town. The grad program is close enough that he’ll still perform with both Providence Research Ensemble and Ordinary Affects, the Boston-based quartet in which he currently plays vibraphone and keyboards.

Soft-spoken and careful with his speech, Falzone becomes quite animated over any number of suspects, from pentatonic scales to the British art of change ringing, the collective ringing of church bells in a mathematical sequence.

Falzone has already composed eight pieces based around the tenets of change ringing, and his notebooks are full of braided grids of bell ringing patterns. (Here’s one for trivia night: about four hundred years ago, English bell ringers would tug on weighted ropes to practice their craft. The silent—or dumb—bell ringing allowed them to keep in shape for when it was time to climb the tower and ring the actual church bells. And that’s why dumbbells are called dumbbells.)

Infrequent Seams is an experimental music label—that’s their term—that will release the first album from Providence Research Ensemble this June. The album features eight players performing a number of Falzone’s compositions from the past three years. A short tour of the Northeast will follow this summer.

James Falzone – Founder, Providence Research Ensemble
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Top photo James Falzone, Providence Research Ensemble | Photo by Peter Gumaskas

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Erminio Pinque just spent an action-packed weekend at Big Apple Comic Con when we talked, but the Big Nazo founder sounds more energized than deflated as he explains what his creatures were up to in New York. The surreal performance group was hired as the wedding band for Comic Con co-founder Mike Carbonaro and model Nina Martinez (who opted to get hitched in a Wonder Woman costume). The creatures also worked as the party band for the convention’s cosplay area, where enthusiastic attendees partied down while dressed as their favorite comic book and video game characters. They somehow even made it to New Jersey to perform at a theater.

It’s been 30 years since Erminio Pinque founded the Providence-based troupe Big Nazo. “Creatures is a useful term,” Pinque says when asked to describe the characters, which range from dapper insects to schoolmarm-attired sea monsters to a bespectacled mad scientist with three eyes. “We use puppets and masks and parade techniques, but we’re not a parade group or a puppet ensemble. The word creature is weird enough to encompass it all.”

Big Nazo began informally with “sloppy street performances,” but officially debuted in Providence City Hall as part of the city’s 1987 New Year’s Eve celebration. Three decades later, the loosely knit collective can be seen at events and festivals throughout Rhode Island, as well as internationally.

It’s hard to miss the looming, loony creatures when you’re in downtown Providence. A staple at outdoor events in the city, the instantly recognizable creatures also lived in the windows of a corner storefront right next door to City Hall.

Constructed from lightweight plastic, foam, and fabric, the flexible creature costumes can be crushed down for easy travel. Once unpacked, they pop right back into shape. “When we go on the road, we wrap and roll them in hockey bags,” Pinque says, noting that the wear and tear actually improves their overall quality. “When they’re new, they’re shiny and rubbery. They look like toys. As they age, the texture actually starts to look more like skin.”

Big Nazo

Big Nazo’s schedule is predictably unpredictable. After Comic Con, their engagement list included appearances at the Providence Athenaeum for an H.P. Lovecraft event, then a St. Patrick’s Day parade the following day. April will find them in sci-fi mode for the Space Jam party at Fête Music Hall, followed by the trip to Brazil for an electronic music festival.

“Commissioned work is instrumental to our design process,” Pinque says, “because it allows us to solve problems that we would have never tackled. Right now, we’re making giant stilting creatures for an electronic music festival in Sao Paulo. We’ve never made stilts before!”

A few years ago, the original storefront the group inhabited was sold to a major Boston developer, so Big Nazo only moved around the corner. They recently moved again. The new space on Westminster Street is a little smaller, but has really high ceiling—a helpful luxury since some of the creatures are huge. Pinque keeps the doors open when working, and visitors are always encouraged to drop in.

Big Nazo – Erminio Pinque, founder
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Photos by Thomas Alan Photography

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