OUR HISTORY

Artrageous has a rich history reaching all the way back to the 1980's where we formed together in Kitsilano, BC. Much like Cirque du Soleil we started out as street performers, performing as clowns, jugglers and puppeteers for anyone who would stop by. 

One of the first artistic endeavors we undertook 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 3 puppeteers dressed completely in black to work together to animate a life sized puppet figure. Our first life sized puppet was named Howard who was 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.

Our troupe has a common thread of always wanting to observe ourselves and become the best version of us we can be, we found that performing was a direct path to learning about ourselves in a creative way. We studied and learned sacred dances and put on performances all over Canada and the US. On one particular tour we were traveling in a gutted yellow school bus through the southwest United States. Our performances led us to New Mexico with only $80 to our names. We finally ran out of money and here we still are!

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.

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That evening at a friends 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 coloured bird rising from the ashes) One problem... only one person new an instrument. 

One of the unique things about Artrageous is that we have self taught ourselves most of the arts that 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 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 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, Richard Bransons 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 2 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 that 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 as our final offering into the world of entertainment we wanted to combine all our experience and knowledge onto one stage. Artrageous was born! Artrageous is the only act of it's kind on stage today so when you go to see Artrageous you are seeing not only a troupe of family and friends who have built a life on 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!

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