JW: You've just completed this new ten­show run at the Co-Motion Theatre. How did you feel about it?

MM: The show was good. The theatre is an independent one known for producing original works. I was there the year before, but this year they decided to do an ambi­tious project and put me on their "Major Motion" series. It's more of a cultural thing, intended to be more challenging for an adult/adult family audience.

I entitled the show "Visual Song," for one reason because it helps explain the presentation of the work. I've always been more of an artist than an entertainer. Though I do things that are entertaining, I've always been most comfortable in the role of an artist. The audience understands that a musician is both an artist and performer, but not long ago a juggler was a clown, and that's certainly not me.

JW: You don't interact much with the audience at all, do you?

MM: Not in some pieces, but there's a few I'm working on now where the "fourth wall" is down. At the concert in Lancaster one of the pieces I opened with is the "chime stick," a devil stick made from a pipe that chimes when you hit it. The whole piece is about rhythm and I have the audience use certain things to create a rhythm of their own. There's no speaking in it at all, but audiences like rhythm. It's very universal.

JW: Does the public know what they're getting into when they decide to come see one of your shows?

MM: In the last 10 years the public has been educated very quickly that there's a great potential in variety arts. It's an excit­ing performance art and the public re­sponds well to it. But you do get these odd questions. At this concert people were calling for reservations and asking, "Is the show clean? Can I bring my kids?"

JW: Of all the pieces in the Visual Songs show, the most surprising thing had to be "The Coil." Can you explain it?

MM: The coil begins at my feet totally collapsed on the stage. I pick it up and it grows around me, and then it's this thing I'm in, like an elephant's trunk. On a technical level, the apparatus is a true coil. There's a support , hook above me that I lift it toward and attach it to. Below me, I'm standing on a circular disk like a 360-degree rola bola that conceals a small ball.

Once the coil is up and attached at the top, I shift my weight in a circle so the ball spins around and gains speed in the disk until it starts traveling up the rings of the coil. I hold the sides of the coil, and by moving it once the ball picks up off the ground I can create energy to keep it traveling upward. At that point it has quantum energy, and can jump up several levels of the spiral at a time if I want. Also, by slowing down the movement, the ball will lose energy and drop down a certain number of coils, so I can manipulate it both up and down the coil around me. And it works with more than one ball, too! I'm not performing it with more than one yet, but will probably do so within six months.

People interpret it differently, but to me personally, it's a metaphor for the search for the truth. I don't want to give away too much of the piece, but it speaks to the liberating quality of honesty. I did it for the first time last September at Celebration Barn, and did it again at the Halloween show before performing it in Lancaster.

JW: Did you get the idea for the coil while watching a slinky?

MM: You investigate a lot of different things, so I guess you could say it came from "cross training." I wanted to do something different, and with a large object, and something kinetic rather than static. I started playing with variations of rola bolas, and

earlier I had played with slinkys. There's a subconscious aspect, too. Artists have things inside of them that want to get out, and you just keep working on different

tools until the thing kind of clicks. Then, " Eureka!"

It took me three years to solve all the technical problems and design and build it. I built a couple of prototypes that weren't there, and came back to it over time. People ask me, "How did you ever figure out that this was going to work?" and I say "I didn't know, I just took a gamble. I wanted to make it happen!!"

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