This is Crowdsourcing Mornings! This post takes place every weekday morning and highlights one crowdsourcing project I liked from Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or other crowdsourcing websites.
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Madeline Mahrer and Marissa Fenley, long time BFFs and theater collaborators, are getting together to merge their two loves–puppets and reality tv—into a playful yet scathing critique of their two hates—capitalism and white-heteropatriarchy. In other words, we are filming the pilot episode of our new puppet show: Beverly Hill!
We have managed to scrounge together three creative arts grants! Huge thank you to The Arts, Science, and Culture Initiative, The Creativity Grant at University of Chicago, and The Committee on Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. However, given the current state of arts funding, this is nowhere near enough to cover our full project budget. We are asking you to help us cover the difference.
Wealthy White Women seem to be everywhere in popular culture from Desperate Housewives, to Big Little Lies, to the 10-years-and-running Real Housewives franchise. But what would happen to these monied women if they lost all means of currency? Our puppet comedy series, Beverly Hill, explores the dynamics of rich housewifery by forcing it to adjust to a post-capitalist world. This half hour pilot episode, which gestures towards a longer series, takes place after a global economic revolution and follows six formerly rich bitches—each represented by a 15” rod puppet— as they struggle to maintain their sense of self in a world that has left them behind. The six housewives now live together in a mansion on Beverly Hill, the last hill left standing in the one-time playground of the rich and famous. For the housewives, Beverly Hill is a safe haven from the revolutionaries who brought about the end of capitalism and their own personal apocalypse. To the rest of the world, Beverly Hill is a trash heap, and its mysterious mansion dwellers, delusional shut-ins who refuse to acclimate to a new world order without wealth gaps.
As we follow our six squaterettes—occupying a luxury home is a right and a privilege—throughout the episode, we learn about how they have managed to reconstruct modes of capital accumulation amongst themselves, a patriarchal hierarchy to which they subject themselves and each other in order to preserve the symbolic order of wifeliness, and fictional genealogies of Whiteness past, those storied lineages that whisper hereditary promises of restoring the housewives to their conditional roles of power. The show explores numerous inconsistencies built into the women’s identities, now exposed by the absence of an externally maintained system of wealth.
As of July 21st, this project has raised $14,500 of their $15,000 goal. This project has 2 days left to raise the $15,000 or it will not be funded. For a pledge of $25, you will get blooper reel access. For a pledge of $100, you will get a personalized tagline. To learn more and to pledge money, go to: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/beverlyhill/beverly-hill?
