Hungry March is in a play
entitled
ONCE THERE WAS A VILLAGE
performed at La Mama
You must come!

January 25 - February 11, 2007
Thursday - Sunday 7:30pm
Sunday Matinee 2:30pm
Tickets $20
http://www.lamama.org/

At the northeast corner of Tompkins Square Park, in the median strip
between the sidewalk and Avenue B, there used to be a tree stump in
which some anonymous artist had tagged the rings with dates of
historic important in that very spot -- here's when the Draft Riots
were in the 1800s, and when Emma Goldman made a particular speech, and
when Charlie Parker lived across the street, and Allen Ginsberg around
the corner, and when the first Wigstock happened, and when the place
was a swamp. That tree had seen it all; unfortunately the whole stump
was removed in the last few years, making this vertiginous sense of
history a little less palpable. The same kind of sensation, though,
comes across in an "ethno-rock opera" the Hungry March Band is
involved in, "Once There Was a Village...", which opens tonight at La
Mama ETC on East 4th Street, performed by the Czech-American
Marionette Theater.

"Once There Was a Village" started out as a memoir of East Village
life by Yuri Kapralov, a Russian writer and artist who lived in the
neighborhood from the late 50s until his death last year. His art was
largely created from stuff he found in the street, and accordingly
much of the puppetry and the set in the performance is created from
street discardia -- old suitcases, broken vacuum cleaners, bike parts,
the guts of an old piano, etc. The performers manage to turn this
debris into a living pastiche of scenes from the neighborhood's
history, 400 years worth of it on the short side of two hours. And,
the Hungry March Band is doing most of the music for it! Frank London
(trumpet player extraordinaire) worked with the band to develop a
suite of songs that appropriately captured the complicated history of
the place, ranging from a song written in 1420 as a Hussite anthem
(sung in archaic Czech) to a salsa setting of a Miguel Pi�ero poem.
It's a challenging and lovely piece, and will be running for three
weekends starting Thursday, January 25, at 7:30, with a Sunday matinee
at 2:30.

More information about the piece is online at
http://www.lamama.org/,
with a long piece about the play at
http://www.lamama.org/archives/2007/OnceThereWasAVillage.html

La MAMA Etc., 74a East 4th Street, NYC. 212.475.7710

And speaking of Frank London, he and Matt Moran were on the Sound
Check radio show on WNYC two weeks ago, and spoke highly of the Hungry
March Band, in the context of the hot hot hot brass band scene in NYC
these days. Check out the show at
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/soundcheck/episodes/2007/01/12

Hope to see you there!