Membership Down!, at the Portuguese American Club Tuesday night, will be this off-season’s last chance to enjoy the high-spirited, collaborative performance style of multi-skilled Island choreographer Abby Bender.
The fast-moving, variety-style game show, led by Ms. Bender and her cousin, Molly Coogan, has become one of the Vineyard’s off-season entertainment highlights while raising money for Island causes.
This spring’s beneficiary is the P.A. Club parking lot, which needs resurfacing. To fund the work, Ms. Bender and Ms. Coogan have put together an evening with a belated St. Patrick’s Day theme, in which their red-headed contestants — Shelagh Hackett, Mac Young and Alex Wright — will tackle a variety of goofy challenges before a live audience.
Singer Darby Patterson, DJ Jordan Bullinger and actors Xavier Powers and Molly Purves round out the cast, and the game show judges will be Elisha Wiesner, Arielle Faria and Heather Beeman.
Will there also be rubber chickens? There’s a non-zero chance with Ms. Bender, who once covered a New York City stage with the fake naked birds amid more than a dozen dancers dressed as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. She has also clad dancers in disposable shopping bags, road-running gear, acid-green leotards and lounge-lizard suits, often using large casts to fill the stage with movement, texture and color.
Whatever Ms. Bender and her collaborators bring onstage at the P.A. Club this time around, audience members count on quirky costumes and props, wacky dance move and waves of laughter as the evening unfolds.
“Play is something that’s always been important to me,” Ms. Bender said, during a conversation with Laurel Redington at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum on March 8.
Best known for the annual Built on Stilts dance festival she co-founded in 1997, Ms. Bender appeared most recently as the impresario of Where Am I? Songs, Dances, Musings and Other Urgent Experiments, which brought 16 Island performers to the stage of Pathways Arts Space in Chilmark March 7.
“I just stitched it together. Everyone came with something of their own,” she told Ms. Redington at the museum talk.
Ms. Bender also has created a series of site-specific performances on the Vineyard that tell strange and compelling stories through a mixture of dance, drama, comedy, music and film.
In last year’s 5ister5 of the Ark, she transformed a borrowed cottage in the Oak Bluffs Campground into a haunted house inhabited by living myths whose clash built to a devastating climax. As with her other site-specific works, 5ister5 of the Ark led small audiences throughout the house, where each room held a different part of the story told by Ms. Bender’s cast.
The place itself informs the narrative, she told Ms. Redington and about 30 fans at the museum talk on March 8.
“When I get permission to use a space, I walk through it and I almost immediately, within a half hour, know the trajectory that I want the audience to travel — and then the show starts to build,” Ms. Bender said.
“You just let your imagination go wild,” she said.
Rizing, a collaboration with dancer-choreographer Jesse Keller Jason in 2021 and 2022, also took audience members through a rambling Oak Bluffs summer home — one Ms. Bender has known since she was a child visiting Ms. Coogan and her family, who have owned it for generations.
In 2023, she produced a Halloween show called Granger Things at Grange Hall in West Tisbury, where Ms. Bender also takes part in the off-season open mic series Locals at the Grange.
Her first site-specific work was also a collaboration with Ms. Jason, bringing dancers, actors and musicians to the Martha’s Vineyard Museum grounds on Halloween weekend of 2020, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The socially-distanced outdoor performance, culminating with a group dance to Monster Mash on the museum lawn, was a major production on a scale she’s unlikely to try again, Ms. Bender said during the museum talk.
Along with her work in the arts, Ms. Bender holds down a part-time job at Mocha Mott’s coffeehouse in Vineyard Haven, where Mr. Powers and Mr. Young are baristas as well.
“I do think about, ‘wouldn’t it be nice if I didn’t have to have a job that wasn’t [my art]’” she said. “But I love my job. I love meeting people and chatting with them about their day and giving them something that makes them happy and wakes them up. It helps inform the larger mission of what I do,” Ms. Bender told Ms. Redington.
“I would say I create community through performance...because I’m a good conduit,” Ms. Bender added, noting that her work with Built on Stilts is not as onerous as people may think.
“Everybody brings their own work. I don’t make it all. I just give a platform for it,” she said.
Unlike many arts groups, Ms. Bender does not seek large-scale grants for Built on Stilts or her other work, although she regularly receives support from the Martha's Vineyard Cultural Council.
"These are relatively small but essential grants," she told the Gazette in a follow-up this email week.
"I also do solicit donations from audiences annually but because I don't rely on my art for income, and merely need to cover expenses and pay casts, I don't often apply for large grants, or always require ticket fees for my productions. I find this allows a certain freedom that I cherish," Ms. Bender said.
Membership Down!, the game show, got its start in 2018 at the Oak Bluffs library and has taken place at least once each year since then, with proceeds benefiting an array of Island causes.
Tuesday’s show at the P. A. Club runs from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., with a $20 suggested donation.
Editor's note: updated to correct Ms. Bender's job at the coffeehouse, the name of the Grange open mic series and her position on grant funding.
Comments (1)
Comments
Comment policy »