Conscious Choice: A Play About Animals and the People Who Love Them

November 2002

A Play About Animals and the People Who Love Them

Playwright Jesse Richards and Hundredth Monkey

by Bobbye Middendorf

Even as I write this, I grab for inspiration from the parakeet that twitters in the background, cheering me on. A sleek black cocker spaniel eagerly awaits one of my bouts of procrastination — ideal opportunities for a spontaneous walk. While the urban trees outside my window are unlikely candidates for a tree-sit, they provide pleasant summer shade and winter shadow patterns from bare branches. I observe that the inspirations, nurturance, and consolations that most human beings draw from the natural world and our companion animals are mostly unstated in our hectic lives.

For anyone who has loved an animal or experienced a powerful moment in nature, it is stating the obvious to talk about the connection. We humans experience an astounding variety of miracles connecting with the wild and domestic animal consciousnesses that surround us. Multimedia artist and animal lover Jesse Richards affirms these inner connections in a new and expanded performance of Animal Lovers’ Project.

Richards is bringing her musical-dance-multimedia performance company, Hundredth Monkey, to Chicago to reprise the work, last seen here in an early incarnation for a single performance at the Theatre Building in 1999. Constantly revised over the past five years, Animal Lovers’ Project is characterized by its creator as "a labor of love on all parts, filled with inspired moments that carry it forward...even the insects come right when they are needed...It’s a celebration of miraculous stories."

What Is "The Hundredth Monkey"?

The name of Richards’s current performance group is based on the story or metaphor of monkeys on an island in the Japanese archipelago who learned to wash the sand off their sweet potatoes. Scientists studied how this potato-washing behavior "jumped" to monkeys inhabiting a distant island once the original island’s population of sweet potato-washing monkeys reached a critical mass. "We’re all seeking the hundredth monkey. Everyone who is working on behalf of awakening is part of the hundredth monkey energy. I want to be associated with that positive energy. It’s like a rudder on a ship — it keeps you focused on the positive, moving forward."

A prolific and tireless interdisciplinary creator with a lifelong commitment to singing, songwriting, dance, and theater, and with a love of animals deeply rooted from childhood, Richards says, "I’m always creating. I’m always looking for new ways to express ideas. People are drawn to the work who want to use art to spread the light, to spread the positive energy."

Five years ago, when her close companion and soul mate, Lusha the dog, died, Richards was inspired to focus her energy on an issue that has been a continuing commitment since she was a child: humans interacting with animals and the natural world. Early in Richards’s life, Razmatazz, a neighbor’s basset hound, became her first best animal friend. "I hung out with that dog. I thrived. No one even told me when they put it down. To me that dog was equal to any human, probably surpassed some humans."

She poses the initial ideas of her performance piece as questions: "What can I do to speak for the nonhuman animals? What can I do to stand up for them and celebrate them? ...The goal is to create a strong, positive, entertaining look at animals and the issues of animals, serving the end of living more respectfully and harmoniously with animals and the Earth."

With her decades of experience in performing every kind of dance (from African and ballet to martial arts and character dance), Richards has won fans of all kinds — from animal rights activists to interdisciplinary performance artists like Laurie Anderson. Of Richards’s work, Anderson says, "Animal Lovers’ Project is a wonderful show! It comes straight from the heart, and that’s an incredibly rare thing. A beautiful painting of the animal world."

Richards acknowledges, "I wrote this piece to honor animals I’ve loved, while portraying the issues in an entertaining and engrossing way. You can use the arts as a tool to motivate people to consider new ideas, to support ideas that only a few may have considered. This is a show really designed for entertainment. It’s a chance for people at all levels of loving animals to take a look at some of the profound interactions happening between humans and animals, both domestic and wild, as well as interactions between humans and nature in general. If you can give people something so entertaining, they will look at things that they would never consider otherwise."

The frame for the performance piece is a woman and her dog traveling across the country. The woman is haunted by animal dreams, telling her to go and find the hundredth monkey. Her goal is to find and connect with other animal lovers. Says Richards, "She is seeking animal lovers, people who have had strong interactions with animals, nature, trees, the Earth itself. The [idea of] the hundredth monkey is connecting with people who care so much that when you’ve met enough people, or the one more additional person who is lit up by the idea that the light is in all creation, then suddenly that awareness travels to all beings."

This traveler is compelled in her search to connect with likeminded animal lovers to create the mind shift that apparently happens when awareness reaches critical mass. She toils toward bringing to reality the realization that the light is in all creation, even as she seeks to connect with that one more person. Richards says, "We’re not here alone. We’re here in a circle of life. We’re kindred spirits on a joint journey. We’re not the Omni beings. We’re all in the circle moving forward."

Recognizing that we are here in this circle of life, as kindred spirits, means that every being then moves forward on an evolutionary journey embodied in this performance as a celebration. Nor is this fictional search far removed from Richards’s own personal quest. "This has taken more fortitude than I even knew I had," she acknowledges. "I can’t separate my work from myself. I’m putting myself out there in these shows."

As Animal Lovers’ Project has taken shape over time, Richards has been seeking stories "from people who’ve had outstanding, life-changing experiences with nature and animals." Those true stories are then turned into multimedia performance vignettes with original music and lyrics, powerful dances, and video backdrops, separated by video clips of real people telling their own inspiring animal or nature stories. She refreshes the show in each locale by connecting with and including a powerful animal story from a local animal lover. From Chicago, she has drawn a new story from Kim Ogden, the animal communicator recently profiled in Conscious Choice (October, 2001).

Among the twenty-plus stories presented is the tale of John Stokes and the wounded eagle Osceola. Another piece features Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservancy and a whale. Julia Butterfly Hill’s two year tree-sit in Luna, the thousand-year-old redwood, is the inspiration for another piece, while John Travolta appears in a video interview vignette sharing an animal story.

One of the most talked about scenes in Animal Lovers’ Project is one in which a woman contemplating suicide goes into a secluded spot in nature where she is approached by insects. Richards has only recently added video footage of a praying mantis that came to pose with the dancers after a powerful intention was communicated by the group. Two hours after that intention, the praying mantis landed on a dancer, and stayed for nearly twenty minutes of filming.

Richards recalls a friend from her youth who went out into a field and committed suicide. Richards exclaims, "My God. If she had only known all the life that was surrounding her and calling out to her! She could have been fueled by this. What would have happened? She might still be alive today." In the piece "Insects," the woman is surrounded by insects doing a dance of invitation and life.

Inspired by Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, works by the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, the performance art of Laurie Anderson, and people like Nelson Mandela, Richards constantly expands her universe and sources of resonance. "My relationship with the Divine is my greatest source of strength in this life, and that which drives me. God, Goddess, the Great Spirit has become ever more expansive for me."

She admits that she has consciously created this show as a circle, to invite everyone in. "We meet people where they are, invite them into an open-armed embrace. I truly believe that in the future we will look back at our current time, we will look at our abuse of animals, of our unconscious use of animals, and we will ask ourselves how we ever allowed that to happen."

This idea drives her to push the limits with Animal Lovers’ Project, as she did in her earlier pieces, Human Nature and A Woman’s Body. "My sense is that we’re all on a path toward our own enlightenment. Each one of us has such outstanding potential. I wanted to use the arts to keep supporting all of us to look at ourselves, our path, to keep focused on the light, to bring a sense that we’re all in this together. I want to support us all to reach for our miraculous potential. That’s the bottom line for me: the belief that the light is within us all. It’s limitless. Let’s support it, and watch it blossom. That’s why I write these shows."

Funny, heartbreaking, inspiring, life changing, and ultimately enlightening. It’s all there in Animal Lovers’ Project. If celebrating animals and nature is on your agenda, check out the upcoming Animal Lovers’ Project at the Theatre Building during the last half of November. Conceived by Richards and performed by her and the company, it’s an experience for all lovers of animals.

Bobbye Middendorf is a writer inspired and supported by animals and nature even in the heart of Chicago. Contact her at jasbjm@earthlink.net.

Animal Lovers’ Project is a multimedia production that celebrates the animals in our lives. It will be performed by Richards and her company, The Hundredth Monkey, at the Theatre Building, 1225 W. Belmont Avenue, Thursdays through Sundays from November 14 until December 1. Tickets are $22, available at the box office, 773-327-5252, via Ticketmaster, 312-902-1500, or on-line. Company members include: Julia Ingalls, Catherine Marquardt, Maia McKinney, Alyssa Schreiber, Kathy Tossas, Montgomergy (Wiggy) White, and founder Jesse Richards. For more information, check out www.animalloversproject.com.

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