The Royal Frog Ballet is an amoeba of collaborators, a producing body, a shouting household of households, and an aspiring dance team in search of parade.

We create performance and installation art for community gatherings in outdoor landscapes, promoting aliveness through creativity, community, and curiosity. We are committed to making magic, speaking out, and listening.

Since 2007 we have convened annually to create large-scale works of performance and sculptural installation for The Surrealist Cabaret. Our ever-shifting group of collaborators travel from far and wide to the place where this work and our personal connections first began in what is now known as Easthampton and Amherst, MA, on Nipmuc and Pocumtuc land. The physical landscape and our multi-layered collaborations fuel a special blend of conceptual, cheeky, ritualistic, folk art, that we occasionally tour and exhibit in other places as well.

Together we create space for communities to gather, celebrate, commemorate, speculate, pause and leap.

Our work is imaginative, collaborative, generative, investigative. We believe the practices within our collaboration and community gathering are directly related to the needs for restructuring our shared realities. We believe that health and survival is collaborative—that the health and survival of our community and of ourselves as individuals is intertwined with that of all people and communities whose race, class, gender, sexuality, culture, abilities and age are too often cultural barriers to health and survival.

We do not accept that a world that includes such racism, sexism, classism, trans/homophobia, war, violence, destruction, greed, and oppression, as ours does, is our best. We do not accept that our planet needs to be ravaged in order to live. As a collective, we endeavor through our work to continually ask each other and our larger community what it means to be a part of this world. We use questions to frame our process of collective exploration starting with:

How do we make a different possibility possible in this world?

The Surrealist Cabaret is a buffet of dream senses crystallizing in the form of an outdoor performance each fall.

With the wind full of the breath of apples, wood-smoke, the smell of fields turned under for the winter rye, violins bellow along with the cows, sequined show tunes follow dirty and divine offerings to the dead, poets mutter to the stones as sculptures and flags unfurl from the undergrowth. This is an evening not to be missed.

The Surrealist Cabaret is a performance installation that draws on images familiar and ethereal, haunting and campy. This performance takes audience members traveling through a farm landscape at autumnal sunset. Along the way they encounter a surreal collection of short performances, installation pieces, and roving characters created by artists working collaboratively in various media, exploring and celebrating themes of season and place. Magical, luminescent, and a dash of spooky.

What started as an open studio for performance artists to show works-in-progress, the Surrealist Cabaret has turned into a wild celebration of season, landscape, death and regrowth, spirits, stories and community. Each artist takes the theme for the year and runs with it, often in all directions.

The evening will delight and befuddle you with its volley of dancing skeletons, puppet shows, flocking birds, poetry, lanterns, sculptures, parades, saints, dancers, stilters, musicians, and more!

It is dirty, it is holy, it is down home, it is…well, surreal.

The Royal Frog Ballet

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