A meeting of the creative minds will christen the brand new Voxel stage this week as playwright Lola B. Pierson and local avante-garde rockers Horse Lords premiere their joint venture, The First Thing That Happens, on Feb. 13.

The new experimental opera, from local theater company The Acme Corporation, is an exploration of the human experience that finds a series of actors struggling to make their ideas come across and come to life. It’s a meditation on “the construction of the piece itself and about what we as humans and artists give up to communicate with other people,” says Pierson, who wrote and directed the piece.

The idea was born from an earlier collaboration with Horse Lords’ Andrew Bernstein, who worked with Pierson on Azimuth for Baltimore Rock Opera Society in 2015.

“We both had a really good experience working together,” Pierson says. “I’m a pretty big fan of their work, and Acme does a fair amount of work with music. So I approached Horse Lords about a year ago about maybe doing another thing together, and they for some reason said yes.”

The partnership highlights the avant-garde sensibilities of both groups, and the creative process has allowed them to experiment with what exactly “opera” means.

“I’m not sure if classic opera people would call it that, but we’re calling it that,” Pierson says. She and Horse Lords have been working together since last summer in a back-and-forth process, adding and changing elements in a sort of ongoing conversation as they crafted the piece.

“They’re very flexible and adaptable people, and they’re a highly collaborative band,” Pierson says. “Day to day they embodied a thing that I think theater is all about, which is reacting to the thing that’s actually happening in the room. They said something in one of our first meetings where they were like, ‘We kind of think of our work as tricking people into dancing to avant-garde music. And I was like, ‘Oh, I think of my work as tricking people into feeling to avant-garde theater.’ We’re good teammates.”

The results of this team effort will be performed in seven acts on the newly minted Voxel stage from Feb. 13-March 1. It’s the first performance at the Old Goucher performance space (and former home of The Autograph), which is owned by local software company Figure 53. While its daytime mission is to be an education and exploratory resource for the community, by night it’s on offer as a DIY theater space for rotating resident artists. Pierson, who works part time with Figure 53, was selected to be the first artist to use the new black box theater to stage The First Thing That Happens.

The venue offers a flexible new space for performers, who can reconfigure the 70-100 seats as needed and have access to in-house professional lighting and audio equipment.

“Right now it looks like a big empty box that’s available to do whatever you want, which to me as an artist is the most exciting thing in the world,” Pierson says. “I think it really has the potential to be an incredible asset to the Baltimore performance community as a whole. The support and the artists’ community we have here feels unique, and it feels like there’s this really special moment going on.”

While you may have to wait to take your seat for Putin On Ice (that isn’t the real title of the show), the new production from Single Carrot Theatre and The Acme Corporation, the play begins as soon as you walk in the door.

Figures in black hoods wander the space, eliciting concerned glances and occasional giggles from those waiting in the lobby. As you fill out a survey about Russian president Vladimir Putin, the hooded figures may take you or your fellow theatergoers away, but don’t worry. They, like you, are free to leave at any time.

You finally enter the theater in the dark, and without a certain degree of open-mindedness and a good sense of humor, you may leave in the dark as well. But Putin On Ice, an act of collusion between Acme playwright Lola B. Pierson and Russian-born director Yury Urnov, isn’t here to make you comfortable. Running through October 7, this absurdist portrait of the man, the myth, and the legend of Putin brings you into a cult of personality that is definitely, maybe, not an actual cult.

Pierson spoke with us about Putin, working with Single Carrot, and how to approach this brand-new theater experience. But it’s most important to remember, again, that you are free to leave at any time.

This is kind of complicated production you’ve got. In the simplest terms, how would you describe this show?
I would describe it as a cult initiation during which you will experience the truth of Putin.

So simple then.
Yes! It’s just like any other play you would see any other place. [Edit note: This, like much of the play, is a lie.]

What drew you to Putin as a subject?
It actually was sort of an indirect thing. So at Single Carrot, this was like years ago, we had this joke around the office that they were going to do an ice capade about Vladimir Putin, and then they started thinking like, oh, actually that’s kind of a good idea. We should maybe do that. So they approached the director, Yury Urnov, who is Russian and lives here now, and he obviously was like, “Yes, I definitely want to do that!” And the way he explained it to me was, “Imagine if Trump was in power for 20 more years. That’s what Putin is like for us.” And that’s really intense. We had worked on a show together before and it had gone really well. So he approached me about writing it.

What was it like working together with Urnov on this?
We met a lot and sort of just talked about things he thought and things I thought, and then I generated like 35 pages of raw text for him. No stage directions, no characters, just text. And that’s what he walked into rehearsal the first day with. Then, over the course of rehearsals, people from Single Carrot and people from Acme and designers and actors all brought more and more stuff to the table. We would rewrite and turn things into scenes and like restructure.

We both believe really strongly in the fluidity of text in theater. Like I think theater is a visual medium and text is just one element. We actually cut a scene last night, so it’ll be a different show tonight, which the cast are being very good sports about. It’s kind of a cool, fun process to do that And I think we’re lucky that both our brains sort of work pretty similarly and are pretty comfortable in the land of collage, which is what the piece is. It’s kind of amazing how often he’ll be like, “I think we need to cut this,” and I’ll be like, “Oh my God, I totally agree with you.” It was highly collaborative.

So how have people been reacting to Putin On Ice so far?
It’s been totally varied. Most people I think are like getting the joke. You don’t really have to have any prior knowledge of Putin to understand anything. So most people I think think it’s really funny. We did get one review and it felt like the guy just like totally got it, and then we got another review and the reviewer was like, “I’m a pretty intelligent person but I still don’t get it,” which we’ve actually been using as our pull quote and sending out to our newsletter and stuff. I mean there’s a lot of spectacle in the show, so you can engage with it on that level if no other level. But I think people have been into it and gotten it, gotten what we’re going for, which has been kind of a nice surprise.

Can you explain why the show has nine different Putins?
They’re different facets of representations of Putin. There are all these different images of Putin that I think are very consciously being put out into the world. There’s the one that’s like, oh, look at him snuggling with animals. He’s such a caring person. And it’s more adopting those personas than it is actually embracing Putin as a person.

The thing we’ve been talking about a lot, which obviously Yury has more knowledge than I do, is that we actually have no idea what’s true about Putin at all. One of his top advisors was a modern art guy, and he’s really into collage and manufacturing meaning, and he’s just putting out any information that he can about Putin, whether it’s like good or bad or anything. It’s just anything at all, so no one can trust anything. Russian propaganda is so sophisticated, right? It’s this manufacturing of propaganda so that you don’t even know what you’re supposed to believe. And that’s the point.

You worked together with Single Carrot on this show. How’s the collaboration been?
It’s been awesome. We have a lot of designers on our team, Yury’s an Acme member and I’m an Acme member. So a lot of what would normally be the driving artistic team was Acme people, but the actors, and Single Carrot has more actors, they were actually pretty involved in the creation of the process. And Single Carrot is just a bigger organization, so they have staff and structure and more people. I think the barrier to go somewhere new is very high, and they have been extremely gracious about opening their home to us like nine lunatics and have been totally nice to us.

One last thing. Do you have any advice for people coming to this show?
They should bring cash. And an open heart and open mind.

Visual Art

MICA ArtWalk
Maryland Institute College of Art undergrad class of 2018 will showcase their work in the three-hour ArtWalk extravaganza on May 11. Expect to see art in all genres and mediums: painting, sculpture, illustration, ceramics, graphic design, film, animation screenings, and more. New this year, the event is free to the public, complete with food trucks to give the event a festival feel. “The entire campus becomes one huge art gallery,” says Erin Baynham, social media manager at MICA. This is a great way to see what these talented kids are up to, with the added bonus of meeting them face to face and buying work to take home. 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. May 11 throughout the MICA campus. Work will remain on view through May 14. 

Music

The Björk Songbook
The Evolution Contemporary Series will conclude its season on May 8 with a concert of songs by Björk, taken from her newly released 34 Scores for Piano/Organ/Harpsichord & Celeste. Baltimore artists including Outcalls, Joy Postell, and The Witches will play renditions of songs by the legendary Icelandic pop star. Judah Adashi, founder of the series, is known for breathing new life into symphonic music, and this concert is sure to be no exception. 8 p.m May 8 at An die Musik, 409 N. Charles St.

Through the Eyes of a Child
The Through the Eyes of a Child performance is inspired by the work of Clara Han, associate professor of anthropology and co-director of the Program on Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship at Johns Hopkins University, who is exploring in a new book how violence is passed down through generations of families. The concert will be presented as part of Music of Reality, a series that brings musicians and scientists/researchers together and intersperses lectures with music. Music will include pieces by Leonard Bernstein as well as contemporary composers. 7 p.m. May 4 at 1025 S. Potomac St.

Theater

Life or Theatre?
With Baltimore Annex Theater’s production of Life or Theatre?, Charlotte Salomon may very well become a household name alongside Anne Frank. The play is written and directed by Carly J. Bales (founding producing artistic director of EMP Collective) and based on the life and art of Salomon, a German-Jewish woman in Nazi-era Berlin who completed nearly 1,300 autobiographical paintings (the largest singular body of work by a Jew during the Holocaust), gave them to a friend, and was murdered shortly thereafter in Auschwitz. The play combines her intimate prose and expressionist painting with music to bring to life her story, 100 years after her birth. This is Bales’ first full-length play. Thursdays through Sundays May 24 to June 17 at Annex Theater, 219 Park Ave.

Follow No Strangers To The Fun Places
The Acme Corporation will dissect the process of art making (specifically theater) in their new play Follow No Strangers To The Fun Places, by Lola B. Pierson (creator of Baltimore’s Ten Minute Play Festival). It’s loosely based on Italo Calvino’s novel If on a winter’s night a traveler, though we’ve been told not to get too excited about that point, as the play bears little resemblance to the book. May 3 to 19 at The Great Hall at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, 1900 St. Paul St.

SOUL The Stax Musical
Go back to the birth of soul music at Baltimore Center Stage’s production of SOUL The Stax Musical, which revives the songs of Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, The Staple Singers, and other classic R&B stars during its world premiere. The musical tells the story of the Memphis-based Stax Records and music’s power to unite us, then and now. May 3 through June 10 at Baltimore Center Stage, 700 N. Calvert St.

Dance

Moving Walls: A Performance of Body & Sculpture
Baltimore Independent Dance Artists examines human experience in relation to architecture in its new, experimental show at The Peale Center. Dance combines with a large sculptural installation and animation for the experience, though the set alone, created by Noa Heyne, is worth a visit to the museum. 8 p.m. May 3 and 5 at The Peale Center, 225 Holliday St.

Film

Maryland Film Fest
There is much to be excited about when it comes to this year’s Maryland Film Fest in Station North. There’s Matt Porterfield’s latest, Sollers Point, starring McCaul Lombardi; 10 blocks of shorts; a screening of the film I, Olga Hepnarova, selected and introduced by John Waters; an after party in the Ynot Lot and Windup Space; and much in between. Get ready to laugh, cry, and contemplate life every which way with more than 40 feature films across all genres and cultures. Learn more about it here and here and here. May 2-6 at the Parkway Theatre and MICA.

Miscellanea

Baltimore Portrait: Artists in Conversation
As part of the VOICES speaker series at The Church of the Redeemer, Baltimore artists Amy Sherald and Stephen Towns will be in conversation with Baltimore Museum of Art director Christopher Bedford this month. Both have become Baltimore celebrities recently after receiving national attention for their work—Sherald with the unveiling of her official portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Towns with his first museum exhibition (currently on view at the BMA). 7 to 8:30 p.m. May 30 at The Church of the Redeemer, 5603 N. Charles St.