The Firefighters

Set to audio interviews collected over the past six years, The Firefighters is a contemporary puppet performance illustrating the effects that redlining and disinvestment in Detroit neighborhoods have had on the physical bodies and mental health of its firefighters.

Since 2013, Carrie Morris has interviewed firefighters across Detroit to understand what it means to work within a landscape recovering from decades of neglect. These stories are emotional, funny, harrowing, and visceral. In The Firefighters, we learn of a new cadet who spent six months recovering from a building collapse and a fire chief who served 30 years on the force, but received a delayed diagnosis of pancreatic cancer because he did not have health care.

The work gives form to these stories through spoken dialogue and pre-recorded audio narratives, using bunraku-style puppets, shadow puppets, large-scale props, and hand-painted miniatures of neighborhoods. In a city whose infrastructure is currently being “redeveloped,” these stories inspire discussions about where resources should be allocated, whose lives are worth investing in, and how those investments should take place. The examination of these works in miniature gives audiences an opportunity to participate in large-scale change.

Date: October 12-13, 2019
Partner: Carrie Morris Arts Production
Location: 2221 Carpenter Ave, Detroit, MI 48212
Coordinates: 42.40447, -83.06995

About the Artist

Carrie Morris is a director and puppeteer who choreographs handmade objects to tell stories. The plays she stages are well-researched, involve multiple performers, and typically designed for adult audiences. Her works can be large scale (using life-sized elephant puppets) or small scale (3” silhouettes). In her performances, puppets are representations of bodies whose stories require clarity, urgency, and care to transmit.

Carrie is interested in performance that includes multimedia elements, performing objects, and performance in experimental spaces. She was a Fulbright grantee in the field of performance art for multimedia shadow puppetry in Indonesia. Her creative work has been seen at NYC Fringe Festival, Detroit Institute of Art, Seattle’s Annex Theater, Detroit’s DLECTRICITY, and as a guest artist with the Grand Rapids Symphony. Her work has been supported by the Jim Henson Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. Morris holds a BFA in directing from NYU and an MFA in studio art from the University of Michigan. She is the director of Carrie Morris Arts Production (CMAP), an intimate performance space and forum for puppetry and theater in Detroit.