David came up in a city that had a decent punk rock and experimental music scene. The DIY ethos that permeated the dives, cabarets, variety shows, warehouse parties and other venues stuck with him. After ditching art school and getting a history degree because he liked stories, and eventually becoming a Firefighter and EMT, he returned to those venues, which is where his journey to playwriting began. He told stories, read poetry, helped others with performance art and made puppet shows for the late night crowd. He eventually started to explore the potential of plays written for humans. He is most grateful to Vanessa Gilbert, Cabaret of the Oddly Normal, and Charlotte Meehan in his development as a writer for performance and is pleased to add Theater Alliance to that list of people and organizations that have helped him on this journey. www.anotherdavidhiggins.com

HIGGINS BLURB

While working as a Firefighter/ EMT, David made his first puppet show. This is thanks to Blood from a Turnip, a late night puppet salon run by Vanessa Gilbert, which was dedicated to pushing on the edges of puppetry with late night shows for adults. Puppetry allowed David to escape the confines of poetry or traditional storytelling and tell a story in whatever way made the most sense to him at that moment, and just for reference, some things that make sense to David are Fluxus, Situationism, and punk rock.

He made a few more puppet shows until he started to explore the potential of plays written for humans. He participated in some some cooperative productions and produced a theater festival called BarPlays that was, you guessed it… theater staged in bars. It was an effort to de-sanctify theater, to return it to its original stage of telling stories with food and drink and to make it fun rather than “good-for -you”. When writing for humans, David still employs a “puppet-ish” approach, using visual elements and objects as units of meaning in addition to the words.

After straddling the two worlds of performance art and emergency services, he got bonked on the head, which scrambled his inner ear, which ended his career as a firefighter and EMT. This messed with his identity, because without a a foot in both worlds, the prospect of becoming a specialized artist promoting Spectacle and commodifying art rather than remaining an outsider was really uncomfortable, but to be fair, there was a lot of discomfort recovering from the head injury.

Part of that recovery was a concerted effort to put things in order. Ordering features in his other writings, such as Over the Top, a multimedia epic that explains WW1 with durational performance, gameplay, snacks and music. Ordering is a central part of Rescue Blow, which follows Dougie trying to put his past in order to answer the open-ended question of “what happened?”

The play was constructed as a piece of Modular Theater, in which passages of text, actions and images are assembled in a manner of a collage or a set list with a couple of intentions in mind. First, it uses a variety of storytelling practices as a way to highlight how difficult it is to communicate events and experiences that are alien to others. Tonight’s scene is one of the more naturalistic passages. The other intention is to explore the casual dehumanization that many of us are subject to or participate in. It’s also funny at times.