Greetings! My name is Gideon Irving. I am a professional globetrotting House Showman passionately dedicated to the art of being unreasonable.

I am a New York City native, I play the banjo, and I have spent most of the past 10 years creating elaborate one-person shows and performing them in private living rooms, kitchens, attics, lofts, basements, garages, barns, trailers, woodsheds, yurts, tee-pees, root cellars, sugar shacks, cooling towers, and occasionally in more traditional contexts like theaters and festivals. My shows are eclectic, ever-evolving mash-ups of song, storytelling, and slapstick driven by my deep abiding love for the element of surprise.  As a creator and performer, I like challenging myself with what at first seems impossible. I invite my audiences to put aside typical notions of what constitutes a “show” or “performance” in favor of something more interactive and communal.  I aim is to bring people together in moments of genuine wonder, delight, bewilderment, and joy. Sometimes I succeed!

I was first inspired to perform in private homes in 2011 when I saw the great Julian Koster (of Neutral Milk Hotel and The Music Tapes) play an enchanting Christmas-themed show in a living room in Bayside, Queens, wherein he accompanied himself on the singing saw and numerous other obscure instruments whilst seated amidst a cluster of enormous glowing lawn ornaments.  He was a glorious magnificent eccentric doing whatever he wanted, from the heart, in the warmest of environments.  At that point I had spent two years in a touring folk band, playing in small music venues across the country.  I loved traveling, performing and meeting all sorts of strange and delightful people along the way but I just wasn't excited about those spaces. I didn't like clubs; I didn't like bars; I didn't like loud.  In many ways those venues seemed to inhibit the very thing that I was after as an artist and performer, which was a real sense of connection, intimacy, and openness with my audience.  Seeing Julian perform in that Queens apartment was a revelation.  It was a glimpse into an intriguing alternate universe and I thought I'd like to explore that.  So my life as a House Showman began.

In 2012 I embarked upon my Way Over There Tour, traveling the entire perimeter of New Zealand by bicycle with a trailer full of instruments and doo-dads in tow.  I arrived on the island with only 5 homes booked via Couchsurfing.com but four months later I had played 84 home shows, made countless new friends, and survived multiple brushes with death by 18-wheelers.  Shortly after returning home, I spent a month criss-crossing New York City on rollerblades for my Staying Put Tour, pushing my instruments and doo-dads in a modified shopping cart through rain and traffic and dog poop to perform in apartments all over the city.  In 2013 I developed The Gideon and Hubcap Show, a two-man music and comedy extravaganza with my dear friend and collaborator Dr. Nate “Hubcap” Sloan, which has since birthed a kid-centric offspring show and album, The Gideon and Hubcap Show for Kids, Adults and Everyone Else. 

A commission with The Foundry Theater in 2014 led to the creation of Living Here: A Map of Songs which I toured through 45 homes in all five boroughs of New York City. In 2016 I joined forces with NYC’s All For One Theater to create my first theater-based production, My Name is Gideon: I’m Probably Going to Die Eventually which premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival ahead of an 5-week run at New York’s Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, and Brooklyn’s The Brick. In 2018 I debuted Twinkle Clumps, an all-new solo home show, which I performed in private dwellings across Australia, Japan, and North America.

At the end of every show I unfurl a world map and invite audience members to write down the name and location of friends or family anywhere on earth who they think might enjoy hosting me and my show. This is how I've found 90% of my hosts thus far (I’ve gone through more than 30 maps).  I've returned to many homes multiple times with different versions of my show, introduced like-minded hosts to each other, created an intercontinental craft project with audience members and supporters that has spanned more than 6 years, and treated every show and tour as a kind of workshop leading to the next iteration. I like that these projects have no end in sight.  I see a living room as an endlessly expansive venue with infinite room for new ways to play, sing, laugh, invite. Playing in homes teaches me how to bring more intimacy into the theater and playing in theaters teaches me how to bring more of a boomtooty production with a capital P into the home.

Over the past several years I have performed in more than 600 homes across four different continents. People often ask me “so what's the plan?”, the implication being that playing in private homes must be leading me to something grander, larger and better.  The truth is, my sense of what I want to say and how I want to say it evolves constantly as I travel from home to home, as does my understanding of what I can ask of my audiences in these small and intimate spaces.  Exploring theaters and working with talented creative teams has been beyond stupendous, but living rooms will always be a part of my performance oeuvre. It's too much fun!

In 2018 I moved to Boulder, Utah, a rural community of some 240 people, to train with cowboys and horse experts in preparation for my long-imagined horseback tour of the Western United States. After many months of intensive training and numerous equine emergencies, I set off from Creede, Colorado in October 2019 with my trusted steeds Troubadour and Augustus. We traveled over 1800 miles through Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona for 6 months playing in 25 homes whilst camping along the way before Covid went and stuck a cockroach in my avocado sandwich. A temporary hold was put on The Horse Tour and I began developing two massive projects that are both about as far from horses and homes as you can get, but I had to keep the creative cogs creakily turning towards some vision.

These big projects have been in development for the last two years. One is a secret that I may or may not ever mention on this particular platform. The other is a big fat juicy boomtooty wam bam call your friend Pam theatrical music extravaganza coming to a real live theater somewhere near you in the next lil while. I’ve been developing it with my dear friend and collaborator Nicholas Cotz. We’ll be announcing more soon.

Invitations, proposals, and possibilities are gratefully welcomed at itstruemynameisgideon@gmail.com.

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 Selected Press

Rolling Stone
Silver City Daily Press
Broadway World
The New York Times (2013)
The Atlantic
TimeOut New York
The New Yorker
Culturebot
Vice
The New York Times (2016)
The Brooklyn Rail
TimeOut Edinburgh
The Nelson Mail (New Zealand)
An Carrannach (essays by Michael Stuart Green)