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Dan Hurlin

By all accounts, Mike Meyer was a curmudgeon. So disgusted by his family and his small Arkansas farming community, he invented a new persona, fabricated his own history and legally changed his name to Disfarmer. There could be no mistake that though he may have walked among his neighbors, he wasn't one of them.

From 1928 to 1959, the Disfarmer Studio in Heber Springs, Arkansas was the only photography studio for miles, and having your picture "made" there on a Saturday night was the thing to do. Farmers from the surrounding county would come to Heber Springs to do their shopping for the week, catch a movie at the Gem Movie theater and then line up for the privilege of being insulted and ordered around by Disfarmer as he worked, sometimes for hours. Then, when everything was set and ready to go, Disfarmer would bark "Don't y'all move and don't y'all blink!" leaving his subjects to stand perfectly still in the brightly lit emptiness.

When Disfarmer's photographs finally came to light in 1974 (twenty years after his death), the world was stunned. The works are straightforward, unsentimental portraits of rural Americans, living in a rough place, in a hard time, but there is tenderness and a sense of longing that haunts the images. How could a man who so openly disdained his fellow citizens, portray them with such compassion? How could a man who so wildly misrepresented himself to the world, represent his neighbors so honestly and tenderly?

Dan Hurlin's Disfarmer is a piece of puppet theater that examines these contradictions in the life of an American hermit. Disfarmer is represented by a series of puppets, each an exact reprint of the last, except two inches smaller. During the course of the play, Disfarmer shrinks like the rest of rural America, until he is completely gone, and we are left with the quiet and nervous expectancy of standing perfectly still for a long exposure. Using the direct manipulation style of American puppetry known as "table-top," five puppeteers reveal our shrinking hero in his studio as he categorizes his every possession, barricades himself from the outside world, and compulsively measures constantly expanding distances between things. 

Set to an evocative score for violin, banjo, and accordion, and a sound scape of oddly funny music from old Edison Wax disks and haunting Ozark Mountain music re-contextualized by Dan Moses Schreier and with text by playwright Sally Oswald, Disfarmer is a haunting tale of transience and perseverance.