Immersive Van Gogh in South Buffalo: Donna Oblongata’s The Van Gogh Shogh Calls Attention to the Economic Lives of Artists
Donna Oblongata, The Van Gogh Shogh, 2024, performance, The Deep End Studios, Philadelphia.
Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Josh Yoder.
On February 1, Vincent van Gogh arrived at Agatha's in South Buffalo, carrying the familiar bag of a food delivery person, and asked who had ordered Grubhub. Head bandaged under his fur cap, with an orange beard and blue jacket, he looked every bit like his 1889 Self- Portrait with Bandaged Ear. Van Gogh then made his way through the crowd, sat on stage, and cracked open a beer. The Van Gogh Shogh—DIY theatre-maker and clown performer Donna Oblongata’s solo performance piece—thus began unceremoniously, with the central character already seeming frustrated by the audience.
One of Oblongata’s first interactions was with a guy in the front row who seemed to be on a first date. Right away, the audience member gave weird and absurd answers to Oblongata’s questions, clearly intending to give her a hard time. It was almost like heckling but for the world of interactive performance rather than stand-up comedy. Like some comics, Oblongata continued to engage with him on and off for the rest of the show. We in the audience could see his date distancing herself from him physically as the performance progressed. But as much as some of us were thinking, “Who is this asshole? Why is he trying to ruin the show?” it was fascinating to watch Oblongata’s interaction with him. It seemed like he was trying to exercise some bit of patriarchal power, but when the clown ridicules you and everyone laughs, all these attempts at power seem childish. This impromptu interaction set the confrontational tone for the play, but it also became an opportunity for Oblongata to use her skill as a clown performer to call attention to the problematic spectator and to diffuse him with humor simultaneously. He even became a kind of touchstone for the themes in the play, an adversarial interlocutor. When I spoke with Oblongata about this interaction, she quipped, “He would probably sooner show me a dick pic than his bank statement. If I were like, ‘Look, in your phone right now, you gotta show me either a dick pic or a bank statement,’ I think the dick pic would trump.” This hesitancy and uneasiness around the public display of finances would prove to be one of the core themes in the show, culminating in a fascinating art auction scene.
Donna Oblongata, The Van Gogh Shogh, 2024, performance, The Deep End Studios, Philadelphia.
Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Josh Yoder.
Oblongata is a touring theatre artist, clown, and political activist based in Philadelphia whose work ranges from large-cast musicals to solo performances. But all her pieces feel hand-crafted, down to the lighting. I have followed Oblongata’s work since 2007, trying to catch any show I could, because this lo-fi theatre brings a visceral excitement I don’t often see in live performance. As Oblongata describes it, “I’m not really interested in work that operates from the intellect. . . . I want my work to be visceral. You can feel it in your gut, your heart, and your body.” It is as if she clears aesthetic space for the performer, character, and live connection with the audience by placing the scenic and technical aspects in the actor’s hand—literally, in the case of this show. There are few “tricks,” no backstage crew, and no light and sound operators. You see just how everything works.
While maintaining this low-budget, lo-fi approach, Oblongata has built several different arcs in her work over the years: She makes pieces focused on climate and the environment, she works with puppets, she teaches clown workshops, and she is a community organizer. Her former company with Sarah Lowry and Madeline Ffitch, The Missoula Oblongata (2005–12), produced intricate and textured pieces that spanned several topics and often felt like wiki holes that magically managed to draw all the threads back together by the end. For Secret Shakespeare (2007–12), The Missoula Oblongata brought together five theatre companies to produce a play by the Bard as an immersive experience, with each company responsible for one of the acts. Oblongata has also made several pieces that play with, subvert, or clown popular corporate art. Jurassic Park (2008), produced with Wham City in Baltimore, faithfully, though irreverently, recreates Spielberg’s film. Less Miserable (2012) was a copyleft appropriation of the Broadway musical Les Misérables in which Oblongata and her collaborators explored casting and creative choices not often permitted in Broadway mega-musicals. Oblongata’s shows are all staged on a shoestring budget, and many are effectively pay-whatyou- can for their audiences.
The Van Gogh Shogh touches on many of these creative arcs, but now Oblongata is challenging the world of “immersive” art exhibits. In some ways, she picks up the engagement with corporate art she started in Jurassic Park and Less Miserable, but she trades large casts and narrative-driven subjects for a solo piece that inverts the corporate art world’s idea of an “immersive experience.” Rather than making a technological spectacle of some of van Gogh’s most famous paintings, she uses techniques from clown and drag—in conjunction with her lo-fi scenery—to draw the audience closer to the life of the artist. In a recent conversation, Oblongata spoke to me about this aspect. “We don’t value artists for their work when they’re alive—even when we’re directly engaging with it all the time, even when we are addicted to Netflix, even when we have a fucking van Gogh painting on our phone cover.”
Oblongata’s critique of the van Gogh immersive experiences echoes the project of Less Miserable. She is a fan of van Gogh, as she is of Les Misérables, a show she describes as “her favorite thing in the world.” She also loves immersive performance, but despite these seemingly shared interests, there are crucial distinctions. In our conversation, she traced how her art differs from these large, corporate productions:
If I’m doing something like Less Miserable, I’m purposely doing it in a way that makes it accessible to a much wider audience and making it represent people and bodies and demographics and aesthetics and political sensibilities that would never be presented in a conventional production of Les Mis. . . . When you go to see it on Broadway, it doesn’t feel political, it feels like a big Broadway show. There, it’s not about how a cop fucking kills himself at the end because he realizes his life’s work was essentially a miscarriage of justice. That’s huge!
In Jurassic Park, Oblongata describes her interest in playing with a “cultural inheritance” bestowed upon her as “a white person who grew up in suburban America” in the 80s and 90s. She notes, “Like with any inheritance, I want to honor what’s worth honoring and critique and change anything I think needs critiquing and changing . . . whether it’s a 10,000-year-old tradition or Jurassic Park.” In The Van Gogh Shogh, Oblongata engages with a “cultural inheritance” that has been transformed largely for the financial gain of wealthy investors. The piece explores the problem of money in art, and it puts van Gogh as inheritance back into the hands of artists.
Oblongata’s interest in immersive performance partly explains her methods of addressing these questions of finance and cultural inheritance. She claims, “To be immersed in something, you’re not just surrounded by it, you’re in it.” She describes this as something that is quite connected to her clown work: “If you’re going to be a clown, your number one job is to be honest and responsive to what is really going on in the room. If someone’s phone rings, if someone walks out, if someone yawns, I am there, responding, and being honest.” It is a type of engaged and character-driven immersion that is so different from the high-budget, projected simulacrum of van Gogh immersive experiences.
Donna Oblongata, The Van Gogh Shogh, 2024, performance, The Deep End Studios, Philadelphia.
Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Josh Yoder.
The scene that captures this most clearly in The Van Gogh Shogh is the art auction. Oblongata brought six of us on stage, sat us behind several easels, handed us beers (or sparkling water if we wanted), and gave us instructions on how to paint The Starry Night. The directions were confusing, surreal, and contradictory; then, Oblongata’s van Gogh judged our work as if running a paint and sip from beyond the grave. After we finished our paintings, Oblongata auctioned them off to the audience, keeping the money for herself. Crucially, this art auction was the first time anyone in the audience had the opportunity to pay for the show. There were no tickets or cover charge at the door. So, Oblongata made it clear that successful bidders would be paying real money and that she would be taking it. She cautioned the audience that she didn’t want to see a “cowardly” secret Venmo after the show: they were to bid on these artworks in the flesh if they wanted to pay for her work in any way. What began with an uncomfortable, squirming audience bidding on our paintings, gave way to excitement as the bidding gradually increased. When someone eventually bid $50 on one painting, we were cheering. There was something liberating about this liminal moment in which we were collectively deciding the value of the performance in situ. We were starting to agree that this piece deserved more from us than we ever would have given at the door. Here, Oblongata blurred the line between her own financial circumstances as an artist and those of her character, van Gogh.
This scene unearths an unusual paradox in North American culture: As much as finance dominates culture under capitalism, it takes a lot of work to get people to reveal publicly how much money they are willing to give to a work of art. Oblongata points to the different ways that wealth and class get transformed into culture instead:
When I look at someone and they have a Louis Vuitton wallet and Prada sunglasses, it’s immediately evident that the person is wealthy. Even the way people speak, the words they use, like they don’t know that everyone is looking at them and thinking, “No, dog, we know. Everyone knows you have more money than everyone else in here.” So, I think making that very visible in the space can be very uncomfortable for people, but it’s very interesting to me.
Furthermore, this is the sort of topic which could be intellectualized, described, and symbolized in her work, but her strategies make the problem visceral, rather than representational, recalling very ancient traditions of clowning from across the world. 1 The clown plays with a topic in a way that is funny and subversive, shaming royalty by making everyone else laugh at them, prolonging uncomfortable topics by making them fun, and blurring the real and the theatrical. It was not a coincidence that Bertolt Brecht acknowledged the clown Karl Valentin as one of the key influences in the creation his Epic Theatre. 2
Oblongata offers these interactive clown techniques as an alternative to bare immersion in projected paintings. Instead, we are immersed in the world of the artist, van Gogh, who struggled with poverty, acceptance from the art world, and recognition in his lifetime. In The Van Gogh Shogh, Oblongata forces us to confront not just the art but also the life of the artist—the struggles of those who create what we cherish yet often fail to support. She immerses us in the lived experience of van Gogh, urging us to rethink our cultural inheritance and how we value those who have bequeathed it to us.
by Evan Moritz
Evan Moritz is a writer and performance maker living in Toronto, and he is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. His work focuses on science, science fiction, the Canadian Arctic, climate change, and theatre as a community-building art form.
This history and the global breadth of clowning tracks across diverse times and cultures, such as ancient Egypt, Indigenous North America, Chinese opera, medieval European jesters, and the fools seen in Shakespeare and Marlowe.
Bertolt Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. John Willett (Methuen Drama, 2002), 64–65.
