What I love most about Henry Goldkamp’s work is the way it hovers around the boundary between anxiety and humor, where it’s hard to tell if what we’re seeing/experiencing/engaging in is funny or… very, very scary (because it’s the void, the darkness which surrounds us from the very famous poem). Balloon Animal, a collection of unperformable performance scripts, invokes the stakes of live performance without actually requiring a whole production to invite them in. There is the discomfort of wondering why we’ve all been gathered here: the audience, the performers, the writer hiding somewhere in plain sight. Are we meant to learn something, to forget something, where am I supposed to look? There is the discomfort of wondering why we’ve come to the show in the first place. What is it that we wanted and what does it mean to have wanted it. And now the clown is laughing at us, and we feel that he’s right to. But then he takes out some outrageous prop, a horse, a giant pencil (out of sympathy? for our sake?) so we can stop thinking about ourselves for once.

— Courtney Bush, author of THE LAMB WITH THE TALKING SCROLL

Across dozens of performances, variety acts, and pratfalls, Henry Goldkamp's Balloon Animal lures us into a festival of flailing wonder. Staged by a cast of irreverent characters, clowns and poets, politicks and scuzzery, Balloon Animal is at turns sad, farcical, biting, and honest. Goldkamp trips over the tightrope between genuine and cringe, bounces, and catches himself again in bouts of virtuosic vertigo. Balloon Animal's prop-poetics will have you sweating bullets, knives, and whatever other slapsticks are stuck in your circus tent of a head.