OUR HISTORY
HOW IT STARTED...
Artrageous has a rich history, reaching all the way back to the 1980s when we formed together in Kitsilano, BC. Much like Cirque du Soleil, we started as street performers, performing as clowns, jugglers, and puppeteers for anyone who would stop by.
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One of our first artistic endeavors was creating a non-profit children's theatre troupe called "All and Everything Theatre," where we taught ourselves the ancient Japanese art form of Bunraku Puppetry. This art form requires three puppeteers dressed completely in black to work together to animate a life-sized puppet figure. Our first life-sized puppet was Howard, a funny, spritely, and a little bit sassy character who put on shows for kids and kids at heart. Howard was well-loved by all and has been reincarnated to join us on our current Artrageous tour.
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Our troupe has a common thread of always wanting to observe ourselves and become the best version of what we can be; we found that performing was a direct path to creatively learning about ourselves. We studied and learned sacred dances and performed all over Canada and the US. We traveled in a gutted yellow school bus through the southwest United States on one particular tour. Our performances led us to New Mexico with only $80 to our names. We finally ran out of money, and here we still are!
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Being the ever entrepreneurs, we started several companies in New Mexico: a house painting company, a cleaning company, and a printing company. Throughout those projects, we always performed, whether it was putting on family shows of Bunraku puppetry at our local amusement park or as clowns and jugglers greeting the guests and maybe creating a little havoc throughout the park or building gigantic papier mache or Halloween installations around town.
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One year, as we were getting ready for Christmas at our theatre building (built by us from the ground up) in the mountains, we got out all of Bunraku puppets, equaling about 30 at that point, to get them ready for a Christmas performance. One of the troupe members noticed some smoke coming from the wall near the 3rd story chimney. Everyone ran from the building as it went up in smoke, taking all of our props, puppets, and printing press with it. Being in the mountains is wonderful, but on this occasion, when we had just gotten 3 feet of snow dumped on us, we could only watch our theatre building burn as the firetrucks got stuck in the snow and couldn't make it up to put out the fire.
That evening at a friend's house, we sat together and decided to take a different path... a common theme was that the troupe wanted to experience the world and wanted to do it creatively. At that moment, we decided to form a band. This band would be called The Pink Flamingos. (in native mythology, the flamingo is the flame-colored bird rising from the ashes) One problem... only one person knew an instrument.
One of the unique things about Artrageous is that we have taught ourselves most of the arts we perform on stage today. So that night, we locked ourselves in our rooms and didn't come out until we could play 30 songs!
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With a little luck and a lot of hard work and dedication, we created the most rebooked and most imitated act on the corporate circuit. Our signature was that we involved the audience and invited them on stage to participate with us in whatever way they wanted. We toured the country and the world as the most sought-after show band, "The Pink Flamingos," from 1990 and are still going out for specialty performances on occasion today!
We have been fortunate and grateful to have traveled to many different countries, including France, Belgium, India, Thailand, Austria, and Richard Branson's private island in Virgin Gorda, just to name-drop a few!
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During our time in the corporate entertainment world, we wanted to stay relevant and broaden our offerings, so we created two other acts called "Art Explosion" and the "3 Painters". These were our first foray into the world of action painting. We realized that we had an incredible leg up in the industry because we had a team of people who could and would work together to create something that had never been done before... a team of artists working together on stage at the same time to finish masterpieces in minutes in front of a live audience.
Our painting acts have had the opportunity to perform for and with some remarkable people: General Colin Powell, the Tuskegee Airmen, Harrison Ford, LeBron James, and many more.
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We decided that as our final offering into the world of entertainment, we wanted to combine all our experience and knowledge into one stage. Artrageous was born!
Artrageous is the only act of its kind on stage today, so when you go to see Artrageous, you see not only a troupe of family and friends who have built a life by providing entertainment and uplifting, joyful spirit at each performance but a legacy of teamwork, creativity, and passion on stage in every art form we have discovered throughout our years touring together.
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- Enjoy the show!
A Walk Down Memory Lane...
The original Howard Bunraku puppet that was part of our non-profit children's theatre days. Howard has been reinvigorated and is now part of our Artrageous show!
ARTISTIC COMMUNITY
As an artistic community, Artrageous has been involved in several commissioned projects. These include the building of a 35’ foot tall Abraham Lincoln in the style of the Lincoln Memorial; the original Musical Comedy ‘Dracula’ performed with the New Mexico Symphony; the full Bunraku Puppetry shows ‘Isis and Osiris’ and ‘Perseus and Medusa’; multiple conference show designs for Fortune 500 corporations; multiple television and radio commercials.
TRAVEL & PERFORMANCE
Artrageous has produced over 3000 shows both nationally and internationally. Artrageous productions have toured since 1990. International shows have been performed in Paris, Salzburg, Monte Carlo, Brussels, Madrid, Macau, Tokyo, New Delhi, Thailand, Oman, Tanzania, Panamá, Dominican Republic, Los Cabos, Cancun, Guanajuato, Bermuda, Bahamas, Virgin Gorda, Toronto and Vancouver among others. Shows have been performed in all 50 States with the exception of Delaware.
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Notable shows include a private performance for Sir Richard Branson on Necker Island, British Virgin Island (2008); a performance at the World Cup Soccer Finals in Paris (1998); headlining at the 44th annual Festival Internacional Cervantino (2016) and appearing at the NBA All-Stars (2019).