Photography from the Fringes

Dan Hurlin’s Disfarmer Unlocks the Mystery of Noted Outcast Artist, Nov. 5-6

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Andrew Zender, azender@umd.edu
(301) 405-8151

October 13, 2009 — College Park, MD. — In Dan Hurlin's Disfarmer, bunraku puppetry combines with an oddly funny text by Sally Oswald and an original banjo score by Dan Moses Schreier to illuminate the contradictions in the life of hermetic Heber Springs, Arkansas photographer Mike Disfarmer (1884-1959), whose portraits intimately captured an entire community even as he held himself apart from it. Disfarmer comes to the stage at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center’s Ina and Jack Kay Theatre Thursday and Friday, Nov. 5 and 6, 2009 at 8 p.m.

Co-commissioned by the Center, Disfarmer reveals Mike Disfarmer’s interior and exterior worlds through a series of puppets, each an exact replica of the last but two inches smaller — shrinking like much of rural America until, by the end of the play, he is completely gone. Emphasizing the deep dramatic effect of the gradually diminishing puppets, Richard Lacayo wrote in his Time Magazine review two days after the performance, "…changes of scale produce a strangeness that imprint an image on your brain differently…two days after seeing that show, I've still got this [three-foot puppet] in my head – and he won't go away."

Two free engagement events will provide further insights into the work. During a Creative Dialogue , “Outcast and Society,” on Monday, November 2 at 7 p.m. in the Laboratory Theatre, historian David Serlin will consider the role of the “loner” and the power the outsider might have to see society more clearly. On Thursday, November 5 at 7 p.m. in the Leah M. Smith Lecture Hall (Rm. 2200), Steven Kasher of the Steven Kasher Gallery will lead a pre-performance digital exhibit of the work of the reclusive artist who inspired Disfarmer.

Dan Hurlin, whose performance work has been seen in presenting spaces through the U.S. and internationally, previously appeared at the Clarice Smith Center in its 2005-2006 season with Hiroshima Maidens. In addition to his extensive experience in theater both in artistic/performance and educational roles, he has received individual artist fellowships from the NEA and the New England Foundation for the Arts, among others.

Disfarmer peers into the relationship between art and society – between the people who live in this world and those who create new worlds, especially those who stay on the periphery. Implicit in the production is a central question about outsiders: Does removing oneself from society make it easier to capture, honor and create magic from a world we sometimes take for granted? An equally fascinating question is at the heart of the production: Who was Mike Disfarmer, and how did a reclusive eccentric inspire people to create works of art about him?

Remembered by many residents as a socially awkward and unfriendly misanthrope, Mike Disfarmer rejected his connection to his German-American farming family and changed his given last name “Meyer” (meaning “farmer” in German) to Disfarmer, using the German “dis” (meaning “not”) to carve out his own identity. Working in an isolated studio often described by subjects as “spooky,” he captured thousands of images until his death in 1951 – images that might have been forever lost until Heber Springs resident Joe Allbright purchased Disfarmer’s entire lot of equipment, negatives and an assortment of junk for $5 from a local bank in 1961.

The collection was later sold to a local newspaper editor who rescued nearly three thousand negatives and made modern prints that he submitted to Modern Photography magazine. Today many historians, artists and photographers continue to study, speculate and search for new meaning in the life of Mike Disfarmer.

For more information about “Disfarmer,” including the Disfarmer Project website, photo gallery, documentary clips, audio-visual content and more, please visit the Engagement Page on the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center’s website at http://claricesmithcenter.umd.edu/2009/c/engage09/e09-disfarmer.

Tickets are $37 for the general public and $9 for full-time students with I.D. Tickets are available by visiting www.claricesmithcenter.umd.edu or calling (301) 405-ARTS (2787). The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center is located at the intersection of University Boulevard (Route 193) and Stadium Drive in College Park, on the campus of the University of Maryland. A parking garage is located across the street from the Center.

This performance is supported, in part, by the Henson Endowment for Performing Arts. The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center is supported by a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency dedicated to cultivating a vibrant cultural community where the arts thrive. An agency of the Department of Business & Economic Development, the MSAC provides financial support and technical assistance to nonprofit organizations, units of government, colleges and universities for arts activities. Funding for the Maryland State Arts Council is also provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Additional support is provided through generous grants from the Leading College and University Presenters Program of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and from The Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation.

Artistic Statement on Disfarmer
I have always been drawn to stories from and about rural America, perhaps as a means of investigating my relationship to my own history, having grown up in a small town. Being introduced to Mike Disfarmer's photographs and learning his enigmatic history, I felt compelled to decode both the images and the man who made them. How did Disfarmer manage to get his subjects to lower their guard for him so completely? How could this misanthropic outcast live his life resenting the rural isolation of Heber Springs, Arkansas, without ever making an attempt to break away?

While the subjects in Disfarmer's portraits are (or were) real people with real lives, for contemporary viewers they are ciphers - repositories for our own daydreams and ruminations. "She is her sister," we might think. "He is about to go off to War," "They are lovers," "That marriage is over." Puppets are also blank slates, inanimate objects whose inner lives are supplied by the insistence of the audience's imagination. This shared quality is what convinced me that puppetry was the appropriate medium to use in telling the story of Mike Disfarmer and his pictures. The small town portrait photographer is a dying breed, and the body of Disfarmer's work documents the vanishing world of rural America with astounding clarity.

It has been suggested that, in some ways, Disfarmer was less an artist than a kind of scientist who pinned his subjects to a black backdrop like specimen butterflies. Puppetry is a medium that, while shrinking the subject to less than human size, magnifies their actions. I am putting Disfarmer and his photographs under the same intense scrutiny that he used on his family and neighbors, to understand and perhaps to even empathize with his photographs as deeply personal expressions of their time and place.