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Finding a personal place in the contemporary art world often feels like a wild goose chase. No one knows this better than the members of the Columbus arts company Wild Goose Creative, the group presenting Nathan Smart and Matt Eyer’s Nov. 20 comedic performance “I'm Telling You for the Last Time … Tonight.”
“It’s going to be different than what people have seen before,” said Ryan Hoke, one of Wild Goose Creative’s founding members. “(Smart and Eyer) try to push the boundaries a little bit in terms of what comedy is traditionally thought of. They’re not going to just go up there and tell a couple of jokes … it’s going to be a lot more interactive.”
“I'm Telling You for the Last Time ... Tonight” is described as a multimedia comedy show in progress. This goes along with Wild Goose’s usual Third Thursday event theme in which artists present works that are open to thoughts and improvement, all in the comforting environment of other artistic colleagues and potential fans.
Smart and Eyre are Columbus-area comedians who blog, podcast, create YouTube videos and write in a non-traditional manner, normally under the title “Blank, Blank, Party Time, Excellent.” The Nov. 20 show will be one of their first tries at weaving together different mediums to make people laugh, and they anticipate audience feedback as a major part of the event.
“I think that part of being a good performer or comedian is respecting your audience enough to require something of them,” Hoke said. “The audience is an important part of the event, especially in comedy -- you know when you’re doing well and you know when you’re not.”
The best way to get a taste of what Smart and Eyre’s show is all about is to listen to their weekly podcast. Think of a mix of standard radio morning talk shows and Ellen DeGeneres -- two individuals’ commentary on random topics that can be slightly hard to follow sometimes, but silly nonetheless. Throw in a dash of the “Wayne’s World” lead characters and hit lines, and you have Matt and Nathan.
Expect uncertainty, audience interaction and some video, in addition to an occasional inappropriate joke about ethnic groups (they are comedians, after all).
The Nov. 20 performance will be the first comedy show on Wild Goose Creative’s event list since the group officially started in 2006. As a part of the monthly events series, Third Thursdays fall on none other than the third Thursday of every month. There’s also a regular event on the first Sunday of every month, Too Many Cooks, which features local cooks and restaurateurs like Eric Bean of the Columbus Brewing Company, who stopped by in October to concoct a special Wild Goose brew.
Wild Goose formed as a dream of six Calvin College theater majors who wanted to do something different.
“As theater majors, people were always asking us ‘When are you going to go to New York? When are you going to go be on Broadway?’ ” Hoke said. “What we’re going to be doing is community based, neighborhood based, drawing on the resources of a location … where we can actually make a difference. I feel like Columbus does that for us.”
What Wild Goose in turn does for Columbus is to create a “community of artists dedicated to supporting and providing resources for other artists,” said Jessie Glover Boettcher, another founding member of Wild Goose. “Wild Goose plans events that bring together artists across disciplines, from cooking to theater to music. Artists meet each other, respond to work, and collaborate in an inspiring environment. This also allows community members who don’t consider themselves “artists” to engage in art in a low-stakes fashion.”
Ryan, Jessie and their fellow founding “geese” (Jacqui Hoke, Karl Boettcher, Elizabeth Dekker, Nicholas Dekker) pulled out a map in 2002 and literally pinpointed places they felt were hubs for current arts movements. They flocked to the sense of energy in Columbus, namely because of artists like Smart and Eyre as well as a growing arts district like the Short North, rather than larger cities that seemed to already have an arts community established.
The members especially associate with the idea of art as a wild goose chase, or “something hard to find but worth the journey,” Jessie added.
