Miss America is the newest work from Talk Show, the experimental duo featuring trumpeter Steph Richards and drummer/modular synthesist Qasim Naqvi. Blending light, video, and theatrics, Qas and Steph craft a dystopian protest that fuses music, theater, and ritual with irreverent humor. The work reflects on the absurdities and quiet horrors of 80s and 90s daytime television, not as nostalgia, but as prophecy, revealing how its warped portrayals of the American psyche remain eerily relevant today. This east coast debut brings to life Talk Show’s forthcoming 2025 release on WeJazz Records.

Projections of archival fragments from 1980s and 1990s talk shows such as Sally Jessy Raphael and Jerry Springer will be a backdrop as Steph’s trumpet resonates through drums and bowls of water and Qasim’s synthesizers and percussion build shifting, hypnotic textures. Miss America invites audiences into a shared act of witnessing; part satire and part mirror of a strange theater of America.

Steph Richards trumpet and resonating surfaces
Qasim Naqvi  drums and modular synthesizer
Steven Wendt live video and puppeteering

A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing.

Talk Show is a new duo collaboration featuring Steph Richards on trumpets and resonating surfaces and Qasim Naqvi on drums and modular synthesizer. Having worked together on other projects for almost two decades, Talk Show marks their first, pure duo collaboration – a space to engage with a sonic language they’ve been cultivating together for years. The ensemble features Naqvi crafting real-time electronics and drum set work, and Richards using trumpets and resonating percussion to summon sympathetic vibrations and otherworldly sounds through timpani, snare and water.

Sharing an appetite for experimentalism, theatricality and irreverent collisions of sound and image, Qasim and Steph met in 2008 at CalArts, which was a breeding ground for open creative thought and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Often working with directors in the theater program, choreographers, or experimental and character animators, Steph and Qasim’s musical language has a rooting in visual performance art. From their first premiere, costumed together inside a giant two-person dress sculpture that consumed a drum set, to their most recent 2025 audio visual nightmare which explores the horrors of 80s daytime reality talk shows, this duo presents a voice of the grimy and the grotesque: a new beauty of questionable acts and character flaws in sound

Steven Wendt is a versatile performer, puppeteer, and devised theater creator with decades of experience in immersive performance art. Known for his work with Blue Man Group and innovative hand shadow puppetry, Wendt has collaborated on groundbreaking multimedia productions such as THIS & THAT. His artistry spans acting, music, puppetry, and visual arts, earning him recognition through prestigious awards for innovation and excellence in theatrical effects.

Wendt’s video feedback performance is a dynamic interplay of light and time—a modern cave painting illuminated by projection. Using two vintage Sony camcorders and no computer effects, the work explores infinite visual recursion reminiscent of facing mirrors, where each subtle crank of the tripod or zoom becomes an act of delicate fractal navigation. Its beauty lies in the difficulty to control it, in the struggle to constrain what is fleeting, boundless and evolving. Here the camera achieves strange consciousness, turning its mechanical eye upon its own seeing, revealing the hidden loop that has haunted our image-making since the first photograph fixed shadows onto silver two centuries ago.

Wendt received The Puppeteers of America – Jim Henson Award for Innovation (2023)