Penguin Cafe Orchestra - Penguin Cafe Orchestra
#323
July 1981
Penguin Cafe Orchestra
Penguin Cafe Orchestra
Genre: Art Folk
5 out of 5
Highlights:
Air a Danser
Cutting Branches for a Temporary Shelter
Pythagoras’ Trousers
Numbers 1 to 4
Paul’s Dance
The Ecstasy of the Dancing Fleas
I’m in college.
New York.
The 80s.
I’m an acting student at Tisch School of the Arts, Experimental Theater Wing. I’m studying Acting with soon to be legend Anne Bogart, she of the Viewpoints theories.
Her grid work will become seminal in my development of a commercial actor.
She has given us an assignment to go into the street, the Broadway and 4th St area, and interact with each other using kinesthetic response, physically and verbally.
I am part of the first team of students.
I pick up a stick on the street and I offer it to a fellow student.
She starts screaming at me. Something was triggered.
I walk away.
Another student, unbeknownst to me, interacted with a civilian who says to her, “Are you looking for the guy with the sweatpants and the glasses?”
“Yes!”
“Don’t worry. I just called the cops.”
I am walking back up the street to the class building.
Someone leaps out of the shadows to try to grab me. I narrowly escape.
Someone else lunges. I pick up my pace.
I reach Broadway and a police car slams it’s brakes on the corner.
Inside the classroom, all of them watching this unfold, Anne says to everyone and no one, “Somebody help that boy.”
The door of the police car opens. I think nothing of it.
A police officer grabs me and slams me up against the cop car. They are trying to arrest me.
Dozens of students rush the street, “He’s a student! It was an acting exercise!!!”
I am let go.
It’s never really addressed.
I suffer PTSD from it for the better part of the next year.
I switch from the acting department to the film department.
I never graduate from college.
I tell this story because the music that Anne used to use when having us do our grid work/kinesthetic response drills is the album, Penguin Cafe Orchestra.
I already owned this so I was ever more eager to participate. The experience didn’t sour me on PGO. It did sour me on Anne Bogart, however.
The album opens with the joyous “Air a Danser”, which is like skipping in an aviary. Then shifts to “Yodel 1” which, I swear is an outtake from a Charlie Brown Peanuts special.
Making a song out of a telephone dial tone is something that is soooo 80s I’m glad it exists but I’m equally as glad that we don’t need to do this anymore.
Sit across from your significant other, pour him or her a cup of coffee, put your feet up, open a newspaper or a memoir and put on “The Ecstasy of the Dancing Fleas” and your whole day will be better.
This entire album is a Sunday afternoon in NYC, pigeons at your window, it doesn’t matter that your view is a brick wall…you’re in New York.
And the Requisite 80s cover of “Walk Don’t Run” is delicious.
Yes. I know this album is an instrumental. And I know that it’s not really “rock”. I included it because it was on the list and the aforementioned story was important for me to tell. And I haven’t heard the record since 1983.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8VOM8ET1WU
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