Eliel’s been with Sticky since way back in the Bowery Poetry days. Poet, performer, bartender, Eliel is now jumping into the center ring to co-produce the series, and direct a short play as well.

Libby
What’s your favorite thing about being alive?

Eliel
My Favorite thing about being alive is the not knowing what will happen next.  It’s also what I’m the most afraid of, but the fear is what feeds the excitement in life.  The unknown.  We can plan all we want but shit is just going to be what it wants to be, and all we can do is adjust and keep on rolling.

Libby
What’s your biggest fear? Mine is fire, and in a greater sense, loss.

Eliel
My Biggest fear is becoming nothing, or being a bored mediocre cliché.
I fear being trite.  I’m also really afraid of cars.  Being in them mostly.  I often have dreams where I am driving and everything goes terribly wrong.  In these dreams I am usually trying to drive from the back seat or the passenger side.  I don’t know why I don’t sit in the driver side.  I never want to have a license or a car or ever be a driver.

Libby
What’s your favorite thing about making art?

Eliel
My favorite thing about making art is of any discipline, is the creating of life.  Starting out with something in one state, and breathing yourself into it to make something brand new out of it.  Be it a character or a song or directing a play or writing a poem or painting something, it is all a metamorphosis that could not have been made the same way by anyone else.  If the art is true, the artist has a conversation with art, making sure that they both inform each other.

Libby
How is the conversation different between poetry and theater?

Eliel
I don’t know that there is much difference.  In poetry you use less words, but the careful choice of words is always there in both.  What I love so much about the short play model is that these plays are exactly like poems.  They try to say more with less.   The full play would be more like a novel.  You still have the time to explain and build and set up a narrative.  With the short play and poems you have to be really cautious about every single word and action therein.

Many playwrights have been poets and vice versa.  From Miguel Piñero to Federico Garcîa Lorca, to Langston Hughes to Amiri Baraka aka Leroy Jones.

Every monologue and soliloquy is a poem.  Just like every dialogue is a dance.

Libby
If it was frontier times, would you head out West or stay home?

Eliel
In Frontier times I don’t know what I would do.  It probably depends if I have masters or not.  I personally love the great metropolis.  The hustle of people criss crossing each other while shedding small influences in one another’s lives.  In Jonah Lehrer’s book “Imagine” he calls this the power of Q.  The amount of people that influence other people and take that influence to a group of new people, each of them with their own power of Q.  I would live where the most people live.  But again it depends if I was a free man or a slave.

Libby
Which gives your imagination freer reign?

Eliel
Between Free man or Slave?  I would say Free man.  I would never want to be a slave.  I also have very little interest in traveling back in time.  I’ll only do so as a spectator, or for a get rich quick scheme.  If I had a T.A.R.D.I.S I’d travel to the future and all of space obviously.

Sticky 552
Beauty Bar, 249 5th Avenue, Brooklyn, 11215
Thursday, February 5, 7:30 pm
$10 advance, $15 at the door
via www.stickyseries.brownpapertickets.com