“Flamboyant and dreamy…inspires awe in its audience just for existing”
“Surreal. Poetic.”
“Ingenious, Hallucinatory, Hypnotic . . . where squares and hipsters alike can seek refuge”
Current ShowS
BROUHAHA
Brouhaha, Squonk’s newest show, is an immersive outdoor spectacle bursting with rollicking music, dazzling imagery, and the thrill of audience participation. At the center of this riotous romp is the Squonkcordion, an enormous musical instrument the audience gets to play. Experience the joy of community, the power of live music, and the pageantry of Squonk’s visual extravaganza.
Hand to Hand
Propelled by Squonk’s rollicking music, Hand to Hand features two giant purple puppet hands, each the size of a house and rigged like a sailing ship. Squonk invites audience members on stage to power the giant fingers, creating a larger movement and web of connections through their individual dance. During this wild revelry, the thumbs detach to become truly opposable. Two guitarists operate the thumbs while engaging in a musical face-off.
past shows
Cycle sonic
Cycle Sonic celebrates bicycles with human-powered stages, propelled by our original chamber rock music…and our own legs!
Pneumatica
Pneumatica is an event about air, made of air and powered by air. The Squonkers pump up the volume with live original music that permeates the air, while inflatables pump up and immerse the audience.
Go Roadshow
GO Roadshow is “a musical street spectacle on wheels”. This show-making machine is a 34-foot long monster truck retrofitted with truck-horn calliope, a wall made of rotors and a spinning grand piano that is played while it wheels around! Each show starts with a shameless parade of peacock trumpets, spinning drums, accordion, sousaphone and glockenspiel.
Mayhem and Majesty
In Mayhem and Majesty, the sonic hooligans of Squonk push the boundaries of musical athleticism and visual wizardry, while asking the question…“What does music look like?”
Astro-rama
The Squonk Astro-ramanauts believe that the recent UFO crashes in the region have been a plea for first contact. They also believe that many of our greatest inventions, like the pyramids, zippers and TV remote controls, were the gifts of our extra-terrestrial friends.
Hometown Opera Series
A series of site-specific operas that adapts to each host community, these shows weave hometown documentation with Squonk’s aural and visual trickery. This meta-civic celebration, with an original score, is a heartfelt toast and a punk-vaudevillian roast.
Rodeo Smackdown
Squonk Opera’s Rodeo Smackdown is a multimedia music spectacle drawn from the myth of the Minotaur and the maze set in the world of cowboys, oilmen and rodeo queens.
Squonk Opera’s Inferno
Based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, Squonk Opera’s Inferno is set in the Appalachian coal town of Centralia, PA, where a mine fire simmers underground to this day. It is a town where trees, still standing, turn to ash. Pets disappear. A place that would melt your shoes where you stand.
The Great Circle Route
An aquatic spectacle gone awry, a ship of fools without a compass…
Created from such diverse threads as medical textbooks, Godzilla movies, the writings of Michel Foucault and watery imagery, The Great Circle Route takes the Squonkers on a descent into madness, under the deep, dark sea. The Kraken, a brine ballet, scintillating piano duets, wacky sax duets and lots of synchronized swimming.
BIGSMORGASBORD WUNDERWERK
The Off-Broadway hit that jumped to Broadway, this show fuses the ridiculous spectacle of Wagnerian Opera with the excitement of a live band and contemporary circus.
Firedogs
Firedogs relives the grandeur that once was Pittsburgh’s steel industry while extolling the wonders of smelting and slag. An active lesson in how to take your history seriously by goofing it up, this re-education seminar is peopled by characters such as Bessie the Bessemer Furnace, Furnace Man (a bug-eyed iron elephant), and Old Man Steel (a slab of steel plate serving as narrator).
Night of the Living Dead: The Opera
“A risky, risqué multimedia frightfest” based on George Romero’s timeless black-and- white cult flick.
An old institution meeting a new one, Night of the Living Dead: The Opera combines the entire 90-minute film with a new soundtrack performed live by Squonk .
Forgotten Works
Pirouetting industrial cranes, stacks of squashed cubes of demolished cars as mini-stages, metal shearers as musical accompaniment, and a pianist in a dump truck. Squonk and modern dance troupe No Language get interdisciplinary in a Pittsburgh recycling yard on the blue collar side of town. Reflecting on the themes of consumption, waste and recycling, the Squonkers get down and dirty in this intense, site-specific piece.
