“Oh my god, one more. Look at that bird again.”
Erminio Pinque, the founder and artistic director of Big Nazo Labs, leans forward in his chair to snap a picture on his phone as Yuranian alien Deddiboht (pronounced data-bow) and The Providence Eye’s photography intern Ning Lan strike poses out in the hallway. The doorway to the Creature Lab frames them. Deddiboht speaks excitedly in its language (which is just its own name, said repeatedly in different inflections.)
It’s Ning’s first assignment for The Providence Eye, and within twenty minutes of arriving at Big Nazo studios in Atlantic Mills, she is already wearing a green prop belly and blue bird head, hanging out with an alien in the creaky-floored hallway of a former mill.
“Deddiboht! Deddiboht, deddi-,” it chatters kindly. Ning and Deddiboht continue racing down the hallway on scooters.
At Atlantic Mills, Big Nazo rents space to accommodate the performance group’s studio and storage space — a place for creatures to be both born and reconfigured. In “The Creature Tunnel,” they store many of the characters along a narrow room, their textured skin lifelike under the glow of Pinque’s green lantern that he carries to illuminate the tunnel. The bumps, lumps, and warts on the creatures’ skin is part of the ethos of Big Nazo, he explains.
“We’re intentionally dysfunctional,” he says. “We intentionally don’t walk in straight lines and sometimes mess up and fall on our bodies when we’re dancing. Our robots bump into each other. They’re impractical — they’re supposed to serve a function, but they’re not working correctly.”
The building itself is full of artists and organizations that may fall outside of a traditional economy’s idea of usefulness (read: profitability). Community organizations like the Retro Computing Society of RI and Olneyville Neighborhood Association (ONA), as well as local artists like Jenine Bressner and artist collective WARP, have thrived in the low-rent studios of Atlantic Mills, the brick walls and curving staircases something of a bygone era of industry in Providence. The textile manufacturing that this building was built for is gone. In the 90s, there was a boom of artists taking advantage of low-cost mill units as live/work spaces. Atlantic Mills feels like a holdover of that creative bloom, and with its sale, many worry about the future of affordability in Providence that makes culture and collectivism more possible.
Atlantic Mills sold for $4 million, “after months of organizing, protest, and debate,” as reported by Providence Preservation Society. The future of the current tenants remains unclear, although the new owner assured PPS that they would work with current tenants to offer them new leases. During the sale process, tenants formed the first commercial tenants’ union in the state; however, the new owners have not recognized the union in negotiations.
Olneyville Neighborhood Association (ONA) — “a community-led organization committed to empowering low-income and immigrant communities through literacy, digital skills, and leadership development” — received a termination of tenancy notice from Atlantic Mills ownership on April 14 and is now being formally evicted. ONA has filed a counterclaim against the previous owners for “alleged breach of contract, trespassing and retaliatory action,” as reported by The Providence Journal.
“What we’re doing when we go out in public is giving acknowledgement to the natural state of things, which is: Things work, things don’t work. Things are in conflict, things resolve those conflicts. We want to be playing in that world so that we can kind of process those human feelings. So ironically, we use monsters, robots, and space aliens to talk about humanity, because people sometimes are not comfortable seeing themselves represented directly,” Pinque explains as he articulates the fingers of an extended monster arm.
After graduating from RISD in the mid-80s, where he studied illustration and performed in theater productions at Brown and RISD, Pinque started experimenting with puppetry. He notes that it was a low-cost and interdisciplinary way to make art, combining several mediums while encouraging collaboration with others. He remembers that along with his ensemble of puppeteers, he started doing live street theater in New York, Boston, and Providence. “The cheapest way to make a movie was to do a puppet show,” he explains. “We were out there on the street doing it without the intention of getting tips or anything.”
“We just went out there in public and created these nonsensical parades for no reason, and the feedback from the outside world was really life affirming. People would stop their cars and say ‘Thank you, you made my day.’ Other people would be like, ‘What’s this for, what’s today? Why is today special?’ And they didn’t realize that the day was special because we met each other.”
Pinque and Deddiboht. Photo by Ning Lan.
Eventually, the tips rolled in. Big Nazo has sustained itself over the decades as an international performance group by taking their act to parades, festivals, concerts, events, and more. The Big Nazo Band dishes up “hot blues, sixties rock parodies and vaudeville,” a la “the Munsters, Sesame Street, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience,” according to a review from The Nice Paper, an out-of-print community newspaper that disappeared in 1995. More recently, NAZO BAND’s sound has evolved into a space funk rock stage spectacle, playing shows at festivals and more.
When people talk about Atlantic Mills’ future, they often bring up Fort Thunder, an underground venue for music, events, and artmaking that was demolished in 2000.
Just as the physical space of Big Nazo’s Creature Lab in Atlantic Mills feels like something from a bygone era, a post-industrial alien playground heavy on practical effects, its website beckons to the days of internet culture since subsumed by website templates and digital marketing.
BigNazo.com is a rabbit hole of photos, character lore, and even a world map of the different places where the group has performed. Edna’s Pocketbook, which is located somewhere in the Indian Ocean on the map, links to an archive of photos of the character Edna Putzbuckle with various friends and family, including her son, Leslie.
Left: Edna on the prowl in Pawtucket, RI. Right: Ratso, Edna, and Leslie Putzbuckle in New York. Photos via bignazo.com
When asked about the story behind Edna, Pinque explains that the humans behind the characters stay anonymous; however, he did mention that Edna was active as part of Big Nazo several years ago and was a hit among crowds. “She was a young person who took on the appearance of an older woman and embodied youth by the way she expressed herself. I think people were really compelled by that.”
Looking at the archival photos, they are almost too joyful to witness without being able to join in on the fun, separated by the computer screen. Why does it feel harder and harder to find spaces where people can be more than they seem?
Today, you can catch Big Nazo and its current ten members at a local event or parade. The homebase of the group has changed over time — Pinque reflects “There no longer is a NAZO LAB downtown, we have set up shop in 5 different Downtown Providence store-front spaces, but we were shut out of our most recent STStation Space studio in the [Kennedy Plaza] Bus Station at the start of the COVID Pandemic and moved into our storage spaces in Atlantic Mills,” — and so have the cast of characters.
But for Pinque, “It never gets old.” He continues, “Ultimately we theatrically process the trauma of being ‘the other,’ the uninvited and unwanted ‘element’ that’s inappropriately singing in a setting where it shouldn’t be, but then inspires everyone else to start singing too with you… Sometimes it’s about going into a room and talking about the very thing that nobody wants to talk about.”
As of now, the future for tenants at Atlantic Mills is unclear under the new ownership. The Providence Journal reports that “The mill officially changed hands into new ownership on June 17.” Edna Putzbuckle is out there somewhere, ready to raise a ruckus.
Today, when they’re not on tour, you can catch Big Nazo and its current Creature Team at a local event or parade. Follow them on Instagram @bignazo.
Dana Schneider is a writer who lives in Elmwood with her cat, Froggy. Her background is in public policy and poetry, and she’s interested in how we experience everyday life within and despite the structures that surround us.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article has been edited for clarity.
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