“Dave & Woody’s Chicken Slaughtering, LLC” presents multimedia illustrations of mundane episodes from the lives of Dave & Woody, as well as from the lives of audience members, as a way of highlighting the significance of personal insignificance. We have sought to create storytelling frameworks that are open to outside participation in easily approachable places, like parks, subway tunnels, art galleries and performance spaces. We have adapted forms of traditionally “objective” information presentation (charts, graphs, maps, etc.) for our subjective and personal storytelling ends—a map of states in which we have regrets, flowcharts of our neuroses, data analysis of audience members’ attraction to specific letters of the English alphabet, etc.

The core component of our performance is a framework we call Improvised True Story Telling (ITST). In 2012, we refined this framework in numerous unannounced outdoor or underground public performances. In 2013, we used this technique to generate other pieces in both performance and fixed media. Our four performances from 2013 drew from and rearranged these new pieces in combinations specific to the venue and anticipated audience.

Our first performance of 2013 in April at Panoply Performance Lab and was a more involved set with numerous live and prerecorded audio techniques, as well as extensive use of projected still video. Our June ITST marathon in Fort Greene Park was stripped down storytelling at its most basic, and more easily wove in stories contributed by audience members. In July at Glasshouse, we devised three frameworks for drawing narrative conclusions from data collected from gallery goers during D&W’s open office hours. Our culminating 2013 performance in August, at Dixon Place, was carefully constructed as a palindrome, and presented stories told largely in a visual manner, setting up parallels of existence between Dave and Woody.