"At the Intersection: Art, Money and Politics" participants, from left to right: Jan Cohen-Cruz, Randy Martin, Morgan Jenness, moderator Amy Whitaker, series curator Andy Horwitz, Rachel Chavkin. Photo by Whitney Browne.

On April 11, 2012 Jan Cohen-Cruz, Randy Martin, Morgan Jenness , Rachel Chavkin and moderator Amy Whitaker came together at the Broad Street Ballroom of Léman Manhattan Preparatory School near Wall Street for a discussion called “At The Intersection: Art, Money and Politics” as part of LMCC’s Access Restricted series, curated and produced by Culturebot’s Andrew Horwitz. This conversation is available as a podcast at artonair.org.

This is the first of what we hope will be a series of thoughtful conversations and essays about issues related to the intersection of art, money and politics.

Sometimes I hear about things that just make me crazy with jealousy. One of those things is FutureEverything, which is, like the coolest festival in the universe. Okay, maybe not. But it is pretty darn amazing. I’m definitely a “future” anything nerd and I love it when super-smart people converge to actively envision and shape the future. There are a number of festivals that are exploring this territory right now – the Zero1 Biennial, the Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier program, Wayne Ashley’s ongoing project FuturePerfect, and pretty much anywhere you look you’re going to come across Blast Theory.

While so much of the conversation around performance and technology (particularly in American Theater circles) seems to revolve around Twitter and Facebook and vague ideas of “interactivity”, the UK’s Blast Theory has been deeply exploring the aesthetics, challenges and questions of technology-enhanced performance since 1991.  Consistently adventurous, they use interactive media to create groundbreaking new forms of performance and interactive art that mix audiences across the internet, live performance and digital broadcasting. Led by Matt Adams, Ju Row Farr and Nick Tandavanitj, Blast Theory does more than merely include video or a live internet feed or comment on the media saturated world we inhabit. Rather they adopt (or created) new technology to build experiences that at once affirm our mediated condition and question our social and political frameworks. They use interactive media to interrogate the received ideologies of the Information Age.

At least, that’s what I’m told they do, because I’ve never had the good fortune to actually experience their work in person! But now is my (and your) chance. Maybe not in person, but to participate from where you are around the world.

Long story short – Blast Theory have frequently been approached by Big Media to create “interactive” content, but when it came down to it, the Big Media guys would balk and ask for it to be pre-recorded. Actual live broadcasting is too expensive, too unwieldy, too threatening and is only reserved for sports and sometimes music. So Blast Theory decided to build their own broadcast platform, which they were able to do through the support of The Space (which deserves an article unto itself – it appears to be a collaboration between BBC and Arts Council England to build a multi-platform channel for the arts).

The first project they are launching for this new platform is a game called I’d Hide You. I’m not sure I totally understand how to play it yet, but the basic idea is that there are three runners on the streets of Manchester trying to film each other without getting filmed.  Online players can watch any given runner’s live video feed and can switch between them. If you see a runner you can take a picture of them. But if the runner you are “with” gets snapped, you lose a life.

Part of the idea is to combine narrative TV (story, character, passive watching) with gaming (non-linearity, active engagement). I’m told you can chat with runners and ask/direct them to do things – visit specific places, talk to specific people. It is hard to say exactly how this will play out or what it might become, because it is just as dependent on the online community to define the experience as it is dependent on the people who are “performing” IRL. It is also exciting because this is a kind of “beta test” of the broadcast-quality technology, essentially launching a new platform for non-location-based interactivity. The possible future applications are limitless.

The game goes live from Manchester at 8M on May 17, 2012, which is 3PM in NYC.

For more information or to play, visit www.idhideyou.com! and/or follow @idhideyou on Twitter.

A woman looking inside the model of Marina Abramović's Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art. Photo by Hyperallergic's Jillian Steinhauer

Since the official unveiling, on May 7, of the plans for Marina Abramović’s Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art, designed by architects Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas in a converted community center in Hudson, New York, the art and performance worlds have greeted it primarily with criticism and snark. There’s good reason for that, I suppose. It’s a grandiose self-aggrandizing project that continues Abramović’s own evolution from art world hooligan to bankable brand (her own terminology).

But what the criticism often misses is a deeper exploration of the aesthetic realities of the space Abramović is creating, how that space shapes the spectator’s experience, and ultimately, how such an approach informs the experience of live art. One of the only writers I’ve really seen attempt to do so is Hyperallergic’s Thomas Michelli. But first, I want to draw attention to something from Hyperallergic’s report he drew from:

But the institute isn’t just for performance artists; Abramović wants to teach the public how to see and appreciate durational work. Visitors will be schooled in the Abramović Method, which blurs the line between audience and artist by turning spectators into performers themselves. Upon arriving at the institute, visitors will don white lab coats, check their belongings, sign a contract — “Give me your word of honor that you’ll spend two and a half hours in the exhibit,” is how Abramović explained the current version, at an exhibition at PAC in Milan — and then move through the different experiences and rooms, receiving a certificate of completion at the end.

Writing on May 12 in reference to the above, Michelli commented:

What Abramović has in mind — a theater, bleachers and viewing platforms for watching performances as well as watching audiences watch performances — not only threatens to transport Performance Art out of the wild and into a petting zoo, but the Institute’s other attractions — a Crystal Chamber and a Levitation Room are two of its novelties — smack of the relational aesthetic shenanigans recently visited upon the New York scene by the echt-shallow Carsten Höller show at the New Museum.

There’s something fascinating about both the construction of spectator experience in Abramović’s institute as well as Michelli’s critique of it (which I sympathize with in its sentiment but find troubling in its terminology), that is indicative of how far apart the discourse remains between the contemporary performance (theater and dance) world and the visual arts. Namely, whether it’s the institute’s glib attempt to “blur the line between audience and artist” or Michelli’s reference to “shallow” relational aesthetics (I don’t disagree with him about the Holler show), it strikes me as weird that no one is simply calling it “theater,” which is what it is.

At a basic level, what Abramović has done is take performance art, which often relies on contextualization within an art space, and put it in a theater. She may want to us to see her institute as a museum, I suppose, or in effect an art gallery, but a space in which audiences wander for a period of time and interact with live events isn’t a museum anymore than, say, Sleep No More is.

This touches on two of the issues we’ve tried to raise here at Culturebot in our exploration of the convergence of performance practices and discourse. First, as Andy argued some months ago:

It is as if when visual artists and curators “discover performance” they think that they are the first to ever encounter the aesthetic issues it proposes. It would seem that they are frequently unaware of – or indifferent to – the fact that there is a long history of performance theory; that theater, and especially dance, have for many years explored issues around presence, embodiment, presentational aesthetics, the observed/observer relationship, the visual presentation of the constructed environment, the semiotics of representation, etc.

Second, as I argued recently:

By and large, such work [performance art] insists upon an understanding or interpretation of its intent in order to place it in discourse with art or society. In order to talk about it, we need to name it, to define it, since it often (though by no means never–there is good [performance art]) has a reduced capacity to speak through the very vocabularies it engages.

So it’s both odd and unsurprising that nowhere in the discussion of Abramović’s new center does anyone actually call out the fact that, for all intents and purposes, her artistic project, after more than forty years, seems to have arrived at some form of theater. It no longer engages in a complex fashion with its context, either a non-traditional one (such as the walk across the Great Wall) or a traditional one in which expectations are subverted or attacked (an art gallery). Her work has, through the long interrogation of her practice, arrived at placing performance within a space for performance, where audiences pay a certain amount of money to watch a show for some period of time and consume an experience. They are cleverly invited, through costuming, into the closed cosmos of the performance; no more will performance art blur the line between the fictive and the real. We’ve gone from boundary pushing to, as Michelli aptly puts it, a “petting zoo,” an immersive, interactive experience. Her approach, divorced from any serious engagement with theater practices, has evolved from a radical form of visual art experience into a rather conservative–or at at least unoriginal–form of theater.

Punchdrunk’s work, for instance, isn’t exactly your traditional play-text in a theater, but it’s hardly radical or boundary-pushing. Sleep No More represents nothing so much as the ability to turn what were once radical experiments into commercial theater over the course of forty or so years. And it is this aesthetic presentation of performance that Abramović appears to have arrived at, following her own course, at the same moment. She’s discovered hip commercial theater, to which the best analogy visual art critics can propose is an exhausted and increasingly vapid form of visual art (relational art).

Not that the comparison is entirely wrong, mind you; my point isn’t to mock. Rather, it just strikes me as–again–a fantastic demonstration of the distance between discourses, at least in the US. We’re truly speaking different languages here, and just as the contemporary performance world could stand to engage more deeply with the visual arts discourse, the ongoing issues raised by performance art, which continues its trendy embrace by the art world (to say nothing of the re-contextualization of contemporary theater and dance within visual arts spaces), suggest the visual art world’s need for a deeper engagement with contemporary performance practices and their attendant theory and dramaturgy.

Specifically, while reading these discussions of Abramović’s institute, I was reminded of one of the most provocative pieces I saw in January during festival season, which offers a striking example of the complex–and in this context, ignored–ways contemporary performance engages in these issues of performance space, spectator/spectacle relationship, and broader issues of social and political engagement. Consequently, it was one of the most understated shows, as well, which is why I think it flew largely under the radar (pun unintentional). Namely, Michael Kliën’s (with Steve Valk) Choreography for Blackboards.

I only had the bandwidth to touch on it briefly at the time, but I think that, by contrasting it with the reductive principles at play in these discussions of performance art, it’s illustrative.

The performance took place at the Invisible Dog in Brooklyn, in the main gallery space. The audience entered and was provided a program, which explained the conceit of the piece. In a large area in the middle of the room, delineated by taped lines, a half-dozen people were drawing on a half-dozen separate chalkboards. They had each been provided a series of instructions (to which viewers were not privy) informing what or how they were to draw. These instructions also apparently contained durational notes, such that at certain intervals the performers would complete one series, erase and wash the blackboards, and then begin another. The audience was invited to wander the space freely. There were seats where one could watch the performance, but most people would engage and then disengage, wandering to read statements (such as “Brute Agency”) on placards posted irregularly–and seemingly without narrative pattern–throughout the space. There was also a back room where tea and water was served. Finally, once the blackboard segment ended, Valk and Kliën led an open discussion with audiences and performers.

"Choreography for Blackboards," by Michael Kliën, with Steve Valk

What struck me about the piece was how successfully it effected its theoretical basis. It remains impressive in this regard. Just a few days ago, I was having a discussion with a choreographer and dance programmer based here in New York who was complaining about the vogue-ish European idea that performance is all process, of which she was skeptical on the grounds that the audience, of course, only experiences a presentation of the work and sees it as fixed in time, “finished,” in other words, regardless of the artist’s intent. While I sympathize with the point, I think it’s more complicated than that, and I think Kliën and Valk’s work points toward ways in which a “performance,” as a distinct, time-based event, can nevertheless naturally lead audiences, through the experience, into an engagement with the process itself. This piece was also exciting on another level, because Choreography for Blackboards functioned without the expectation that the audience was knowledgeable about such discourse or theory in advance.

Instead, it presented audiences with a simple sort of question: since the name of the show is “Choreography for Blackboards,” how, exactly, is what these performers are doing “choreography”? Well, we also know that they’re following instructions. So as we watch, we become aware that the way “choreography” is being defined is as a sort of set of directions, that guide or inform–in potentially unknown ways–an individual’s actions over a given period of time, which we understand because the performers (if we can call them that) seem to come to the end of specific movements of the piece at more or less the same time, despite working independently. Thus we can conceptualize the people at the blackboards as movement artists following a choreography–they are individuals, each producing the performance in distinct ways, simultaneously engaged in a larger, concerted effort.

Having arrived at this, the viewer becomes aware of something else: Most of these same principles are being enacted upon the viewer within the space. Like the artists, there are constraints–durational, spatial, and behavioral–placed upon us within the space, yet we also have a certain freedom of where to look, how to watch, what to do, what to experience. Once we understand how the “performers” are being choreographed, we understand that these same principles are working on us, and the difference between audience and performer collapses, as does the distinction of what constitutes the spectacle (since the spectator watching the blackboard choreography is simultaneously aware that he or she is also a performer within a spectacle from the perspective of anyone watching through the windows).

As such, you don’t have to read any of Kliën and Valk’s theoretical work, like Choreography as an Aesthetics of Change, to understand that choreography, as they describe it therein, is:

a metaphor for dynamic constellations of any kind, consciously choreographed o[r] not, self-organizing or artificially constructed. It has become a metaphor for order, intrinsically embodied by self-organizing systems as observed in the biological world or superimposed by a human creator. If the world is approached as a reality constructed of interactions, relationships, constellations and proportionalities then choreography is seen as the aesthetic practice of setting those relations or setting the conditions for those relations to emerge. Choreographic knowledge gained in the field of dance or harvested from perceived patterns in nature should be transferable to other realms of life. The choreographer, at the center of his art, deals with patterns and structures within the context of an existing, larger, ongoing choreography of physical, mental and social structures, whereby he/she acts as a strategist negotiating intended change within his/her environment.

It’s a quite brilliant execution of just this concept. As the process of the art emerges, it begins to break down these very barriers, and the subject of the performance called Choreography for Blackboards ceases to be the actions of the chalkboard artists, but rather the choreography itself, an engagement–a very genuine one and basic one–with the process. Through the event, these patterns, organizations, and interchanges are revealed; we come to focus on how choreography as a process can be a mechanism to analyze–and potentially reconfigure–the basic social interactions of our daily lives. It becomes unsurprising, from this perspective, that there is information on Occupy Wall Street and its radical democratic practices incorporated into the show as a display.

OWS, as easy as it is to make fun of or declare dead, managed a remarkable achievement: it asked people to consider how they, as a group, could envision a better or more equal or at least more preferable society. The true test of whether OWS is a successful political action or movement is not whether it helps affect changes to the tax code or the break-up of banks or anyone’s laundry-list of policy solutions, but rather whether it manages to lead people from its often tedious (to watch or take part in) exercises in discussion and democracy to seeing these same principles as at play in the larger democratic process–or indeed, if they are not, to demand that they be, that voters, as members of a democratic society, should have the ability, through democratic participation, to play a role in shaping that society and the economy it supports. Those who would prefer a set of reasonable policy changes in the short term (which includes me) and who get fed up with OWS and its endless discussions interspersed with attention-grabbing protest actions (again me, from time to time) fail to give them credit for trying to force this point.

But to return to Kliën and Valk’s Choreography as an Aesthetics of Change, it’s interesting trying to explore this in terms of some of the other discourse touched on here. For instance, there’s an argument, I’m sure, that could tie their work back to relational aesthetics. As Nicolas Bourriaud wrote in the essay that defined the field (Relational Aesthetics from 1998):

The exhibition is a special place where such momentary groupings may occur, governed as they are by different principles. And depending on the degree of participation required of the onlooker by the artist, along with the nature of the works and the models of sociability proposed and represented, an exhibition will give rise to a specific ‘arena of exchange.’ And the ‘arena of exchange’ most be judged on the basis of aesthetic criteria, in other words, by analyzing the coherence of its form, and then the symbolic value of the ‘world’ it suggests to us, and of the image of human relations reflected by it.

Replace “exhibition” with “performance,” and at first blush, Bourriaud could have been describing the sort of interchange that Kliën and Valk helped achieve with Choreography for Blackboards. The crucial difference, though, is that relational aesthetics seeks to achieve its experience through the relation of audience and object; in this regard, it functions in a semiotic fashion similar to traditional theater practices which rely on empathetic engagement with the closed fictional cosmos of a play (or film, of TV show) to take the spectator to some other place, point to a future real-world action, etc., etc. For Valk and Kliën, though, the experience is not a matter of the relation of viewer to object (whether physical or the objectified ephemeral performance event), but rather to reveal processes that act upon them, to make evident these processes, and to use the language of choreography to analyze them.

In fact, both Valk and Kliën were involved with the Ballet Frankfurt’s social practice experiments when they worked there (Valk as a dramaturg, Kliën as a choreographer and performer) under William Forsythe. Kliën continued these experiments at Ireland’s Daghda Dance Company, in collaboration with Valk and others, which served as a platform for various artists and initiatives from 2003-2011, when its activities ceased following austerity budget cuts in that country.

Compared to such efforts, derived through rigorous performing arts investigations, the sort of things Abramović is playing with strike me as little more than glorified entertainment. Her attempts to break down audience/artist barriers amount to gimmicks; her institute reinforces the visual arts’ reliance on theory and its own discourse to situate and reify the work being presented therein. Performance art’s dependency on its relationship to context and discourse continues apace, and within this mode, there is less and less room for meaningful exploration. Her institute is a tomb for the form.

Fair enough; Abramović isn’t everything. But the larger institutional embrace of her particular version of performance art is deeply troubling. Again, as museums and art spaces become more inclusive of performing artists from outside the visual art tradition, they play a greater and greater role in shaping our understanding of such work. But the willingness to embrace Abramović and her brand, while convenient and feel-good-y in the short-term, suggests a continued unwillingness for these institutions to re-imagine their own mission and role within the field. Rather than treat performance in whatever stripe as a shared experiential process, Abramović’s approach suggests–and the support from MoMA and others attest–that the museumification of performance promises to objectify it, hermetically seal it, reduce as much as possible the open, spontaneous experience of live art, and instead subject it to the same stultifying treatment as any other exhibition.

All the Institute for Preservation of Performance Art needs, I guess, is an audio tour to serve as the final nail in the coffin.

LIVING THEATER NEEDS HELP:

We need to save The Living Theatre, period. This month our beloved Lower East Side arts landmark learned that they were facing eviction. Unless we come up with $24,000+ dollars in the next two weeks, the organization will have to close its doors and say good-bye to the Lower East Side forever. With this money The Living Theatre will be able to pay its rent, bring in a consultant to develop a 5-year strategic plan, and turn itself into a financially sustainable arts organization. Bravo.

click here to donate.

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PECULIAR WORKS CALL FOR ARTISTS

The Peculiar Works Project has issued a call for installation artists to design contemporary recreations of classic erotic pillow books. Yowza! Here’s the message they sent me:

Site-specific performance producers, Peculiar Works Project, are seeking a variety of daring, boundary-crossing artists to create immersive installations for a live performance featuring contemporary recreations of classic erotic pillow books. Each artist will be given a room, material resources and stipend as well as a team of collaborators to realize an 8-minute, repeating, performed installation. All together, Spring Pictures of the Floating World will perform June 28 – July 1 in a large site in NYC’s East Village where audiences will move from space to space, charting their own performance experiences throughout the exhibition hours.

Asian pillow books thrived in a time and place beyond western religion and original sin (Google “shunga” for details). This project is open to all types of artists interested in creating one part of a fantastical pleasure palace, utilizing design, paint, sculpture, costumes, puppets, prosthetics, and more. It’s a fun and informative way to explore cultural difference, the western gaze and sexual boundaries. More information can be found at www.peculiarworks.org/pillow.html. If you’re interested and available in June, contact pillow@peculiarworks.org by May 18^th with a resume or bio, and let us know your interest and questions.

Sounds fun!

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HELP ERIK EHN COME TO LAMAMA

Erik Ehn’s  practical and ideological commitment to weaving theater, teaching and social justice has inspired many people in the theater community. Currently head of Playwriting at Brown, his upcoming project, Soulographie: Our Genocides is a performance cycle of 17 plays currently being produced around the country and in Uganda that will converge at La MaMa in NYC this fall. It is a vital project and they are asking the community at large to help support it with a donation of $10.

From the email I received:

Since 2010, independent companies and artists throughout the nation and in Uganda have been producing readings and workshops of these plays, featuring 16 directors across 10 cities. In November 2012, the 17 productions converge at La MaMa in New York for two weeks of marathon performances, workshops, teach-ins, panel discussions, and education-installations.

Soulographie is Theatre of Genocide – an engaged art, intended to bring audiences closer to historical periods of violence through the dynamics of performance, creating a frame for loss and remembrance.  It is a communal activity in socio-political and self-recognition.  In order to free people, to free memories, to free ideas, we must give them voice.  It asks the question: whose voice are you willing to carry?

Click here to contribute.

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Down In the Ground (D.I.G.) – Performance and Sandhogs Together Again!

Down In the Ground (D.I.G.) is a performance installation in which participants uncover the invisible infrastructure of New York City by means of interactive video, sound, and movement. Devised by interdisciplinary artists Liza Wade Green, Will Orzo, Emily Rea, and Lígia Teixeira, the performance begins with a dance around theAcconci Studio-designed fountain in the Visitor Center at the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant and transitions into an interactive exploration of underground New York City. The piece is created and performed in collaboration with Local 147 Sandhogs, MTA engineers, Newtown Creek’s wastewater treatment workers and FDNY explosives experts.

The artists developed D.I.G. through a dialogue with the hidden workers of subterranean New York City– those who spend their lives surveying, engineering, building, blasting and rebuilding our city. Through extensive interviews, underground meetings, and an exchange of artistic ideas, these collaborators have helped the artists explore the incredible infrastructure of daily life and bring this performance installation to life.

About the Artists: 

The Local 147 Sandhogs are New York City’s Tunnel Diggers. The Sandhogs have worked major construction projects including the Brooklyn Bridge, Lincoln, Holland, Queens-Midtown and Brooklyn Battery Tunnels, as well as most of New York City’s subways, waterways, and sewers. Current major projects include Water Tunnel Number Three, MTA’s Second Avenue Subway Line and East Side Access Project, and the Croton Water Filtration Plant.

Liza Wade Green, Will Orzo, Emily Rea, and Lígia Teixeira are a collaborative team with backgrounds in writing, music, computing, physical theater and dance. Bringing together public research processes, design, interactive programming, composition, and movement techniques, they create contextual performance and installation works.

Performance, Installation and Opening Reception
Saturday May 19, 7pm at the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant Visitor Center
329 Greenpoint Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11222

Ongoing Installation May 19th through May 31st - check Visitor Center website for open hours and directions:http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/environmental_education/newtown_visitors_center.shtml

To schedule an appointment contact: wellwaternyc@gmail.com

D.I.G. is sponsored by BIG!NYC www.bignyc.org

Documentation of Olivier Choinière's "Projet Blanc." Photo copyright L'ACTIVITÉ

Yussef el Guindi on Making Theater in Seattle: In all my time in Seattle, I never actually met el Guindi, an award-winning playwright who’s called Seattle home for some time. But I have seen his work, which often grapples with the complex realities of being Egyptian-American in savagely satirical ways. But that’s hardly the only thing he does, and in this interview he offers some remarkable thoughtful and insightful comments on what Seattle has–and doesn’t have–to offer artists.

There are starting to be. It could be stronger. One of the things that would lure me to New York would be an organization like the Lark Play Development Center. That really is an amazing incubator for works in progress. I wish something similar existed here—in terms of the talent it assembles, the pull it has to draw in more talent, and its influence in seeding the works it helps develop out into the larger theater community.

Lark doesn’t usually fall under the umbrella of what Culturebot covers, but the point remains: At the Fusebox Festival, we recently presented a “Long Table” on what it meant to create work in a given community, and what communities could learn from one another, by bringing together artists from both Austin and further afield to have a concrete conversation on what it would take to make Austin less of an “incubator city” (not my term, FYI). I spoke a lot from my perspective coming out of Seattle, and one of the fascinating things I encountered was that some artists in Austin were speaking about strategies to create community and “transient institutions,” since the rate of gentrification was preventing building broader associations with particular spaces. They were bowled over by the stories I told about, for instance, Velocity Dance Center and Washington Hall in Seattle, two institutions for whom the support of 4Culture was crucial, and the impact 4Culture’s near-demise would have had on the community. Of course, Austin provides health insurance to working musicians, so if the rest of us can figure out a solution like that…

Anyway, as always be sure to check out Paul Mullins’ two-cents. He’s the person you have to read to know about Seattle theater.

Claudia La Rocco Interviewed: Well, I’m a little late to this, since it’s a couple weeks old, but I just came across this lengthy interview with Claudia in Movement Research’s “Critical Correspondence.” La Rocco–who writes mainly dance criticism at the Times, was (previously, if I’m not mistaken) dance editor at the Brooklyn Rail, contributes to HyperAllergic, and runs The Performance Club–has a well-deserved reputation as a sensitive and intelligent critic of live performance. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there, as the conversation wanders widely, but for a taste:

I mean while we’re also talking about systems that don’t work, we could talk about journalists and freelancers, and how its harder and harder for arts journalists to make a living. Every week there’s a new story about a paper laying off its staff or having someone who’s not equipped to write about art write about it, or just all of my friends and colleagues who are doing the same thing as the people they’re writing about—I mean they’re working a couple of day jobs and then scrambling to write. And you know the dance and theater worlds are not so good at taking care of their own people either. So I think it’s very easy to look at the visual art world as this sort of Shangri-La, and think, “If they only could operate—if they could only be a little bit smarter and a little bit more…” I think that the dance and theater worlds can get really holier-than-thou at the visual arts world and I can fall into that as well, I mean I think I’ve just sort of done it [laughs]. But I think it’s important to think about what dance companies have workers comp when they should? How many theaters in the city would collapse if they weren’t illegally using interns? You know, glass houses and stones and all that.

Theater Hacking: Easily the coolest thing anyone’s heard of in a while: theater hacking. It’s just in at the Guardian Theater Blog, but it took place in November. As part of Project Blanc, an event the artist terms an “ambulatory theatrical,” an audience assembled where they could collect headsets guiding their walking experience. What happened instead was that they were walked to the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, given second-balcony tickets, told to hide their headsets till instructed, and took their seats. What happened next:

When this audience hidden within the larger audience at the TNM pressed the right button at the appointed moment, they were treated to Choinière’s wry, running commentary on the production they were watching – a monologue that revolved around the question of why we revive classics in the first place, and asked whether the director had really found the contemporary resonances in Molière’s comedy that he claimed in the promotional materials.

Choinière – whose best-known play, Bliss, was presented in a translation by Caryl Churchill at London’s Royal Court in 2008 – has dubbed what he executed a “hacking”. The philosophy behind it: “to enter, to penetrate another cultural event without necessarily bothering or breaking or destroying.” Indeed, Choinière’s inaugural theatrical hacking flew under the radar at the time, completely unnoticed by the theatre’s staff.

Simply brilliant! Needless to say, the issue has only come up as TNM’s commentary on the one-night-only event has raised its profile. According to the Globe & Mail, AD Lorraine Pintal characterized his act as theatrical “rape.” Just the sort of hyperbole that doesn’t surprise me coming out of a major theater defending yet another pointless retread of a classic.

PALISSIMO's The Painted Bird Trilogy: Strange Cargo (Photo: Paula Lobo)

Last weekend, I spoke with director/choreographer Pavel Zuštiak about his recently completed trilogy, The Painted Bird. Sparked by Jerzy Kosinski’s novel set in war-time Eastern Europe, in which a brilliantly painted bird is violently killed by its own flock, Zuštiak started the project in 2010. The first two parts, Bastard (2010) and Amidst (2011) have just been joined by a third and final section, Strange Cargo, playing at Synod Hall at St. John the Divine through May 13 (tickets here).

Tell me a little about how the Painted Bird Trilogy came to be.

I started to think about the project in 2009 with a grant application for Creative Capital. I was looking at what themes I am connected to the most as an artist and as a human. The ideas of belonging or finding your place in a different context were something that were very personal to me, having grown up in a communist country [current day Slovakia], then studying in Canada and Amsterdam [in the 1990s]. I specifically remember going to Canada, it was my first long-term time outside of Czechoslovakia. I didn’t speak Slovak for a year, and I was facing the question of how much of me is me, and what is culturally determined—the issue of identity and how context or environment influences and affects that.

As I said, the [Creative Capital] grant was the impetus for thinking about the project. It was one of those moments when you look through your bookshelf, and The Painted Bird was there. I’d read it before, but those themes stood out, and I was drawn to the simplicity, but also the intensity of the book. On one hand, it’s very raw and brutal, and on the other quite poetic. It’s about a child who is vulnerable in a sense, but also in an extreme situation, which is war. As in my previous work, I’m very interested in the extremes of these poles, and the fine line between them.

It seems challenging to take on a long-term project of this scope. How did you develop and fund it?

It was kind of a puzzle. There were pros and cons to the project. Originally, I wanted to do all three parts in one year. I was concerned about local people having continuity, having this in the back of their minds. Part I [Bastard] premiered at LaMaMa in November 2010, Part II [Amidst] was at Baryshnikov Arts Center in June 2011, and Part III was supposed to premiere through PS122 in October 2011, but due to scheduling, they asked us if we could push to the spring of 2012. The disadvantage to this was that many grant cycles wouldn’t allow you to apply more than once in a given time period: even though The Painted Bird was three parts, we didn’t get more funding because it was three separate shows. We didn’t get Creative Capital, but we were pretty lucky: we got funding from the Jerome and Greenwall Foundations, The Trust for Mutual Understanding, Meet the Composer, and NEFA [New England Foundation for the Arts] has been a huge support—it is the gift that keeps on giving with production, residency, and touring support.

Residencies were a big part of this. For Part I, we had three weeks at the Grotowski Institute in Poland and then two weeks at Stanica in Slovakia, and it premiered at the end of those five weeks. Part II was created during a three-week residency at BAC [Baryshnikov Arts Center]. Part III was created during residencies at MANCC [Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography], BAC, Swing Space [through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council], and Abrons Arts Center. Sometimes it’s difficult in the city rehearsing 3-4 hours, twice a week. For me, it is not as productive as longer days where you can really get somewhere. I think I’m now totally focused on doing residencies, ideally where you can work intensively with all the elements. So many decisions were made this week [at Synod Hall] because we had everything here. Always for me, all the production elements are equal, so it’s not like, “let’s add light to this;” light can be a language.

It has been a very satisfying project, and there is also a momentum with this trilogy: for both funders and presenters, and also audiences, it mobilizes them and connects them with the vision.

What are your plans for performing the full trilogy?

We’re doing all three parts at the Wexner Center [in Ohio] in September. It will be a marathon, about five hours in total: Part I/ pause/ Part II/dinner break/Part III. It will be a test, and I’m quite curious and excited about what that experience will be. When people know what they’re getting themselves into, people are very open to it. I think this will support the idea of a journey: by the time you are sitting across from one another in Part III, you will start to recognize other people in the crowd. It was my goal for each of the sections to stand alone, although hopefully seeing all three will add something to the experience.

Nothing is booked for NYC. Originally when I was thinking about the show, my ideal was that we would do it around the same area so that people could travel between all three performances in one day. I was looking at some venues on the Lower East Side, but I really wanted each part to be in a different space, and it didn’t work out.

You seem very interested in very interested in how people in the audience relate to one another and the space.

Yes, I am very interested in playing with the expectations of the audience. In a proscenium arrangement, the power politics are set up: subject/object is very clear. Because of the theme of displacement and travelogue, I was interested to play with that and disorient the audience through three different stops. Each of them has a different set up and configuration. The first part is a proscenium stage setting. It’s a solo piece, but towards the end there are 50-60 local volunteer performers. There is a moment in which this crowd is facing the audience, and it is almost a ratio of 1:1, playing with that dynamic of who is looking at whom. In Part II, there is no front, the audience is traveling in the space. In Part III, the audience is facing each other. The orange outline onstage, which is set up for Part III, is actually the same as in Part I. So the space is revisited in a different context.

You’ve collaborated with the same composer (Christian Frederickson) and lighting designer (Joe Levasseur) on the entire trilogy, but used different dancers for each section. Was this a choice?

It was a choice—actually logistics would push me the other way. Now that I’m thinking about traveling and budgets, I’m considering how these affect your creative decision making. The continuity is nice—the composer and lighting designer—and there is something about this balance: the new blood coming in, since I usually work with different performers, but also the consistency of working with the same people.

What is your creative process like with these collaborators?

It’s hard to find the ownership of the ideas, we bounce ideas off one another, and one feeds to the next and the next. I would say often I’m a kind of editor, I’m steering the ship, but everyone contributes to the project. For me, it is about simplifying, finding what is necessary and what is extraneous. In terms of the actual work, I am more and more interested in reduction: how can you reduce an image down to its essence, so that it still holds the power of the original but it isn’t ornate. I am drawn to the theater of images, even though I work with the body as the main tool of expression.

Have the sections changed much from your original plan?

I would compare it to cooking, where I have all the ingredients but I never know what the final meal will be. There’s always research as you go. I knew structurally and in terms of elements used what would be in each part ahead of time. For example, I knew Part II would use video.

What is next?

We are planning a premiere at Abrons Arts Center in 2013. To be honest, I’m quite nervous. All of the funding cycles have ended, and many of them have a waiting period, where you can’t apply right away. I feel like there is less funding: there are new initiatives supporting individual artists like Doris Duke, but they are not project based or you can’t apply for them. I feel like they are for artists who are further in their careers than I am.  The joke about funding in the States is that you’re an emerging artist for 20 years, and then suddenly you’re mid-career, and there is no funding. I’m kind of hitting that point. I’m quite nervous about what the next thing will be.

When I came, many people were asking, “why did you leave Europe, there’s so much more funding there.” I moved here 13 years ago, and it might have been true at the time, but no matter where you are, you have to start somewhere. The situation in Europe isn’t getting any better. I studied in Amsterdam, and the situation in the Netherlands now is catastrophic. Ideally I would love to go back and forth between NYC and Europe, but in terms of living, I don’t know whether that’s the answer.  I think it’s a lot more about perseverance and staying on a path, rather than following money or going where conditions are better.

For more of Culturebot’s coverage of Pavel Zuštiak’s The Painted Bird Trilogy, see the following:

• Interview (April 2010)
• Interview (November 2010)
• Review of Amidst (June 2011)

A fascinating little art world tizzy today: an artist/model/performer named Sarah White was recently booted from the West Chelsea Open Studios Show that opens this weekend (May 11-13). White’s project had been accepted by organizers, until she was abruptly uninvited by the organizers when she submitted the publicity images for the piece–namely, the image above.

As DNA Info describes the project:

White’s proposed a four-day performance art piece, which was initially accepted by the festival’s organizers in April before being rejected May 1, would have invited gallery-goers into a room in the Hotel Americano decorated with portraits of scantily-clad White, 24, alongside pics of nearly-nude dudes.

Visitors were invited to watch White on a live webcam while talking to them about art and arousal in society.

In fact, “Naked Therapy” is an ongoing project of White’s–you can visit the website here, and read a variety of her essays and writings on the topic. Not as art, per se, but as actual therapy (she is, however, a practicing visual artist as well). A standard webcam session, in which White will lead you through a therapy session while removing most if not all (given the name, I have to assume) her clothes, costs $200 an hour. The price for an in-person session isn’t listed; however, in the interests of properly serving her clients’ needs, White offers such in-person services as “A Night on the Town,” on the grounds that “some men feel most comfortable in the places they know best – their favorite restaurant, a quiet bar, an exclusive club – and when you’re comfortable, you can really open up. If you’re that kind of man, I’d love to spend a night on the town with you, and we can talk about whatever’s on your mind.” Or there’s a “Walk in the Park,” to help you open up. “We can grab lunch, stroll through the green, and talk about you while sitting on some intimate, out-of-the-way bench,” as the site puts it.

The gallery rejected the show on the grounds that the images made it seem like “advertising” for a “commercial venture.” Oh, and White is not a licensed therapist, so your insurance will not likely be covering her treatments anytime soon.

Anyway, the gallery’s rather gross dismissal of the project as a “commercial venture” certainly carries the stigma that White is really nothing but a prostitute, of either the literal (see above) or figurative (why is it now “art”?) variety. (And just to be clear, I don’t think White is a prostitute in either capacity.) Either way, it was deemed not art, using former Supreme Court Justine Stewart Potter’s infamous and thorough, “I know it when I see it” test.

It would be all too easy to make jokes at White’s expense, and it’s quite possible that it’ll feature in some late night talk show monologue soon enough. But really, this ignores the actually challenging questions raised by White’s practice: Does it qualify as art? Without regard to whether it constitutes good or valuable art–a judgment I’m not qualified to make–the answer, from my perspective, is that it most definitely does qualify as art.

Artist/therapist Sarah White

In fact, the debate touches on one of the central critiques of performance in the visual art world that we’ve been exploring since Andy published his essay on the topic last year, and through the various events–a pair of “White Cube & Black Box” discussions, “Ephemeral Evidence” at Exit Art–we’ve produced since then. Namely, the visual art world, whether commercial galleries or non-profit museums, is essentially object-, and therefore commodity-, oriented. And the hyper-capitalism of the visual art market these days, with record-breaking sales that led New York‘s Jerry Saltz to recently proclaim it a “nasty” “disgusting” “freak-show,” exacerbates the problem; how, given the crass commercialism of the entire field, can a curator credibly claim that one practice is commercial in an acceptable way, while another is not?

The answer leads us to a much deeper discussion of the critical discourse which surrounds and contextualizes visual art. One of the weaknesses Andy was pointing to in his essay is the degree to which “visual art performance” (VAP) rejects the complex dramaturgical discourse developed by performance practices over the past half-century. VAP emerged in the 1970s as a blunt instrument to critique the object/commodity nature of the art world. Chris Burden allowing himself to be shot in a gallery; Marina Abramovic allowing herself to be violated with diverse implements by her audience. While these occasionally touched on explorations of what today we would call “social practice,” at the time this was essentially coincidental.

Today though, VAP has been co-opted by the very field it originally sought to critique. The radical departures of conceptual art from the 1980s on expanded the boundaries of what constituted art in such a way that performance could be introduced into the larger frame of visual art commodity. There’s a relationship between, say, Damien Hirst’s presentations of banal scenarios–a doctor’s office, a cubicle–within a vitrine, and Abramovic’s ability to, as she put it the other day, become a marketable “brand.” Namely, the conceptual artists helped shift the discourse around art in such a way as to insist that almost any sort of exploration could be framed as art. Most of them remained committed to creating objects, of course, but whereas their predecessors, like Marcel Duchamp with his urinal, provoked outrage through their provocative acts, artists like Hirst, the other YBA’s, and others in Europe and America were savvy enough to attach themselves to broader socio-political trends (in Britain, Thatcherism) that promoted a gross sorts of class identity and differentiation. They provided cultural products for new money, and part of their art’s critique was in opposition to the art that served as signifiers of the old money (I’m speaking of the YBA’s here) aristocratic class. New money repaid the favor by lapping it up.

Now, the provocation of VAP has given way to its embrace–witness Abramovic herself. Money has found a way to support ephemerality (and make it pay for the institutions that present it, as The Artist is Present demonstrated). Which is unsurprising, because VAP was predicated from the beginning on the existence of the commodity art world; it defined itself in opposition to one form of discourse, but remained wholly dependent upon it for its very definition. Which means that all of this relies on a critical framework to support the very idea that something constitutes a valuable form of art, which sooner or later proved capable of canonizing and commodifying the work. Far from surprising, it’s a wholly predictable outcome.

But a further consequence of this relationship is the dependency of the work for even its most basic meaning on the discourse of the visual arts. As the critiques of Performa 11–including Andy’s as well as newspaper reviews and the likes of Claire Bishop–showed, VAP has become overly reliant on its framing for even basic engagement, with little or no regard paid to the actual relationship between the work and the viewer. Most of it is reductive, glib, or just plain bad. By and large, such work insists upon an understanding or interpretation of its intent in order to place it in discourse with art or society. In order to talk about it, we need to name it, to define it, since it often (though by no means never–there is good VAP) has a reduced capacity to speak through the very vocabularies it engages. Contemporary performance, in contrast, as we’ve argued previously, is not predicated upon its framing so much as its experiential qualities: what is, and how can we talk about–if at all–the shared experience created between spectacle and spectator through live performance? This is achieved through various skilled practices on the part of the artists, skilled practices many VAP practitioners reject as “inauthentic” even as they do not fully understand them.

From this perspective, then, there’s at least a reasonable critique one could make of work like White’s, or, say, Marni Kotak, who presented her own pregnancy and birth as a spectacle within an art gallery: Such work only has discursive value if it’s framed as art by being presented as art within an art space. Otherwise, it’s just a therapy session (or a call girl date, I guess), or, you know, giving birth. The only critique or exploration such presentations are capable of is dependent in the first place upon it being accepted as art. Which of course gives curators a massive amount of power over such practices, and, when understood from this perspective, makes the artists’ critiques rather glib and predicated upon the ideological assumptions of the broader visual arts field. But seriously, if Damien Hirst can put a cubicle desk inside a vitrine and call it art, surely an un-licensed therapist whose defining approach violates pretty much any health profession’s code of ethics can practice her trade in a gallery and it be seen as art. In a sense, it’s a purely logical progression from recontextualizing objects not traditionally seen as art to recontextualizing entire practices. We’ve already started doing it through comic art, art brut, and other forms, which are appropriated by the art world in their original product form, and then serve as an aesthetic for further investigation by artists working from a more traditional art-world mindset.

Which makes the visual art discourse so odd. There’s always cantankerous art critics (Hilton Kramer comes to mind) who complain that such-and-such a piece doesn’t constitute art, doesn’t rise to the level of a work which is valid to be seen as a work of substantial creative endeavor. But this, too, is of a piece with the nature of the broader political discourse; just as the Bush Administration managed to make a valid question of whether or not such-and-such a practice constituted torture, so too has the art world’s willingness to embrace essentially anything as an art practice co-opted the very question of whether or not something is art into the discussion of art. Our cantankerous art critic validates the work even as he or she decries it. Which ironically means that if White’s Naked Therapy-as-art turns out to be a lark, a sort attempt at an art world Sokal Affair, the joke would be on her: If her work is accepted, even controversially, into the visual arts discourse, that is surely validating enough to contextualize it as art, whether it was intended that way or no.

But the question that remains is, what makes White’s work so far outside the norm? Kotak at least was credited as an artist, regardless of whether critics or audiences thought it was good. Is it somehow offensive for White to present and objectify herself as a beautiful woman having erotically charged encounters with her clients/audience? (And please, I don’t mean to imply she has sex with them; arousal and eroticism is part of what she claims to be exploring.) Laurel Nakadate similarly objectified herself, and was given a solo exhibition at PS1.

Indeed, one could make the argument that White’s central provocation was in how radically democratic–in a very neoliberal fashion–her project is. The converse side of the visual art world’s hyper-capitalism is the degree to which it sees this as a creating the democratic framework for presenting the art. Galleries are open to the public; museums charge only what is necessary (apparently) to support themselves. The relationship between art and money permits for art to be a part of the broader social discourse, to be accessible.

Whether or not this is little more than a self-justifying lie the community tells itself, or a horribly naive view of exactly how much this relationship allows for the art to be co-opted, this permits for the rather gauche and disgusting things that come up, such as Abramovic turning her re-performers into table ornaments at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s gala this past year. It’s the game, curators and administrators argue, that they have to play. MoCA, I’m sure, sees itself as a defender and supporter of cutting-edge art, supporting the arts community and its broader mission to make such work available to the general audience.But  MoCA also does things like this, with apparently no notable cognitive dissonance. Perhaps White’s therapy services could be of use in helping them work through their suppressed conflicts; MoCA’s certainly interested in nude women, as penises apparently make “average businessmen” uncomfortable.

But White’s project, by creating a transaction between her spectator and the artist directly, circumvents the strange and porous relationship between money and art that the visual art world is reliant upon, wherein commodification of the work permits it to be both owned and valued, even as it’s made available to the public in a manner not dependent on its perceived (market) or actual (labor, material or otherwise) value. White’s project disintermediates the financial side entirely by offering itself up as an albeit expensive ($200 an hour over the Internet) transactional experience for general audiences, while at the same time making it far more affordable to the average person than, say, one of Hirst’s ridiculous dot-paintings.

The only validation she requires, unfortunately, is for the establishment to contextualize the piece within its framework, to declare it “art,” rather than un-licensed, un-trained, and potentially un-ethical therapy, which that establishment has no interest in doing, since of course the entire house of cards is predicated on the art worlds’ institutional framework navigating that interaction, and managing the relationship of art audience and art money.

White’s pay-to-play approach may seem reprehensible from some perspectives, but surely we have to give her credit. Abramovic herself recently expressed nostalgia for back when artists were kept by wealthy patrons, as a high culture bauble (and, you know, sex partner; that happened a lot too). White’s approach is very much so in keeping with contemporary standards–it certainly proposes a way to pay artists a practical and economic wage for the labor. Which I suppose means we should support her when she presents her piece in opposition to her banishment, at the Hotel Americano on May 13, from 4-8 p.m.

Two final points in terms of closing notes: First, the fact that this is a discussion that we can have reveals many of the weaknesses of a part–a big and wealthy part–of the visual art world, but only one part. I don’t mean to imply that all visual art–performative or otherwise–is nothing but a weird facet of our hyper-capitalist moment. Indeed, the sheer ridiculousness of the self-referential navel gazing such discourse produces points to reasons why those engaged in other inquiries well-removed from the gallery scene are so important, whether the broad range of social practices that are being explored, or just well-intentioned efforts like Grace Space. And for the world of contemporary performance, as artists like Richard Maxwell and Sarah Michelson find themselves entering these spaces and drawn into these critical frameworks, it’s important that as artists they continue exploring and challenging that discourse, which was part of Marten Spangberg’s recent talk, and his book/blog Spangbergianism.

And second, I want to defend myself from anyone too offended by the title of this piece; I give White a fair bit of qualified credit here, but reading her site, she’s clearly playing with both ideas of “therapy” and call-girl-style prostitution (read the in-person session descriptions I link to and apply the Piss Christ Test); both of which, I might add, are dangerous territories to toy with on numerous levels, and I sincerely hope she knows what she’s doing.

Whatever the case, sadly, for White, both therapy as performance art has already been done (by Lisa Lively), as has prostitution (by Andrea Fraser). But hey, at least she’s got proof of concept.

We arrived in Austin Thursday evening and headed over to sometime-Culturebot contributor Tim Braun‘s place, who was kind enough to put us up and play host for the weekend. I met Tim back when he was in NYC working at HERE Arts Center and we’ve stayed in touch over the years. He has been living, teaching and writing in Austin and now heads up the Fusebox writing/blogging/social media efforts. Every bit the man-about-town, he kept us busy and introduced us to tons of wonderful people and places. Thanks Tim!!

We put our stuff in Tim’s apartment, met is dog Dusty and headed over to the Fusebox Festival Hub, which would serve as homebase for the next few days. There we met up with Ron and the rest of his team – Elle, Natalie, Brad and more – to get oriented. The Hub was in the TOPS building, a former office supply warehouse. They tricked it out with a nice stage set-up, a bar and a gallery space, including a big red swing. Outside at the Hub they had a beer garden/hang out area, with these sustainable eco-chair thingies:

And really cool inflatable seating modules designed by San Francisco’s Rebar Studio. Here’s a pic from a different installation of the same furniture:

This furniture and other production aspects of the festival were being included in a parallel investigation of sustainability conducted by Ian Garrett of the Center for Sustainable Practice In The Arts. Not sure when they’re going to post their findings/research, stay tuned for more information.

After getting the lay of the land we headed over to the Buenos Aires Cafe Este for a delicious Argentine-inflected dinner before heading off to the Salvage Vanguard Theater to see Phil Soltanoff’s new show “An Evening With William Shatner Asterisk”. Working from a thoughtful script by Joe Diebes and in collaboration with designer/programmer Rob Ramirez, Soltanoff has staged a lecture performed by a digital William Shatner puppet. Taking snippets of dialogue from classic Star Trek footage and editing them together, Captain Kirk delivers a speech on art, science and the binaries that we have come to accept as defining experience. The monitor from which Kirk speaks is moved around stage by an actor, in this case a Japanese woman, who at one point breaks the flow by delivering a monologue, in Japanese, about moving to Austin and becoming fascinated by drag culture.

The show raises some interesting questions, the script is thoughtful and entertaining. At one point the Shatner puppet starts talking about “phenomenon” and I went into an internal loop of contemplation about the limitations of language, the residue and transformation of meaning over time, modes of cognition, embodied vs. virtual presence, etc. The night I saw it there were a few technical glitches – surprisingly not in the software but in the connection between input cables – that broke up the flow. In general the Shatner dialogue is very choppy and there’s something at once hypnotic and distancing about a voice constructed entirely of one-word snippets. It reinforces the falsity and computerized construction of the character, while also opening the question of what this would be like if it were smoothed out to appear more “natural”. Still, very cool stuff and a good start to things.

After Phil’s show we headed back to the Festival Hub to hang out, drink and mingle while chowing down on a late night snack of delicious sandwiches from Lucky’s Puccias. (Hey Lucky! Bring your truck to NYC!!). We saw lots of pals from NYC (Hey Eliza Bent!) and met new folks from Austin (Hey Graham Schmidt!) and from other places as well. Good times, good times.

Friday morning we managed to rally from a late night and make it over to The Hub a little after 11AM to catch the second half of a conversation between Wayne Ashley and Ron Berry. Wayne has been curating and producing high-tech performance for years and is partnering with Fusebox on an ongoing basis to bring work to Austin. They talked about some of the projects Wayne has going (Verdensteatret, ERS/Ben Rubin collaboration “Shuffle”, Kurt Hentschlager’s Zee, etc.) and talked a bit about what is to come.

After that was the first Culturebot program – I led a panel on “Performance and Context”. Originally this was going to revisit the conversation that we did at Under The Radar, but between then and now, even in a few short months, it seemed like the conversation has shifted. Especially in a town like Austin and the way Ron has curated his festival, the “binary” if you will, of visual art vs. performance seemed less pressing than a wider discussion of how context relates to creative practice and how that informs the work. So I invited Austin-based artists Wura-Natasha Ogunji and Michael Smith, Phil Soltanoff and curator Hilary Graves from Austin’s Lora Reynolds Gallery to talk. It was a wide-ranging and thoughtful conversation. It was streamed on NewPlayTv but they missed the first half. Here’s what they captured:

Next we went outside and joined Meredith Powell from Art Alliance Austin and Shea Little from Big Medium for an open discussion on collaboration and community-building in the arts. It was a very engaged conversation with a number of representatives of different parts of Austin’s arts scene. I got to bring in some of my experience from my other job and share thoughts/ideas around artist engagement with urban planning and development, cross-disciplinary (and cross-sector) collaboration, introducing the artist’s voice into community engagement strategies, etc. It was also really helpful in that this discussion set the stage for the next day’s “Hair of the Dog Performance Potlatch” long-table discussion on creativity, community and place.

With a few hours open and no specific plans on a hot, beautiful sunshine-y day, we headed down to the Yellow Jacket Social Club for some conversation y cervezas. There was a whole contingent of kids from Minneapolis who had road-tripped down and they joined Jeremy, Tim, Meredith and myself and we whiled away the afternoon talking art until finally it was time to take our leave and see a show.

Jeremy and I headed over to The Long Center to see the Dutch company Wunderbaum’s Songs At The End Of The World. I first saw Wunderbaum back in March 2006 when I flew out to REDCAT to see their show Lost Chord Radio and have thought about them a lot over the past few years. They are one of the few theater groups that really integrate music seamlessly into performance; they have a quirky sense of humor that balances well with their musical aesthetic and are all quite talented performers. Songs At The End Of The World is a series of vignettes loosely based around the idea of a group of people in Antarctica, a kind of last stop on the road to nowhere, a place where people go to think about what might have been if only, if only… I really enjoyed the show, it wasn’t quite as evocative as I remember Lost Chord Radio being, the stories are more personal and less mythic/fantastic, but it is fun and well-done, also in a music town like Austin, this is definitely the kind of crossover work that will attract new audiences that might not normally go to theater/performance. If you find yourself in the same place as Wunderbaum, don’t miss the chance to check them out!

After Songs At The End Of The World we headed over to Lucky Lady Bingo to see 600 Highwaymen‘s new show This Great Country, a re-constructed staging of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. 600 Highwaymen’s Abby and Michael are based in Brooklyn, but the piece was built over the course of several months in residence in Austin. Set in a sad Bingo Parlor that reeks of ancient cigarette smoke, futility and desperation, you couldn’t find a more evocative site for Death of Salesman than perhaps a rundown casino on seedy end of The Strip in Vegas. Using a combination of Big Dance Theater-style movement theater with Richard Maxwell-style affectless acting, the 600 Highwaymen production strips away all the fake pathos of method acting and “naturalism” to let the words and the situation stand out in stark relief. It seems like Miller over-wrote the original and this version is strategically edited. While still long (clocking in at about two hours with no intermission) it still clips along faster than the original.

One of the real innovations of this production is cross-casting, having multiple actors play multiple roles across age, race and gender. The cast was all local and ranged in age from 7-70 with a wide variety of experience levels. The scene where Howard, Willy’s boss, fires him was played entirely by kids – a young boy playing Howard, fired a teenage/early 20′s (boyish) girl in a suit. It was effective and affecting. Willy’s wife Linda was played alternately by an age-appropriate older actress with a physical handicap and a girl who must have been no older than 12 years old, but who acted with a professionalism, grace and focus you rarely see in actors twice, three times her age.

Ashley Kaye Johnson - photo by Will Hollis Photography

Abby and Michael used a variety of “post-modern” techniques to open up the text and the story in powerful ways. At the end of the show when Linda is sitting in the empty bingo hall after Willy’s funeral talking to herself she refers to the fact that she just made the last payment on their house and says, “We’re free” and it just feels like a knife in the gut. It is an indictment of our times – we think we’re free but we’re not, we give over our lives to an American Dream predicated on material wealth, on the meaningless social interactions of buying and selling, we deceive ourselves into thinking that these interpersonal transactions have meaning and connection, we delude ourselves and in the end of the day we’re not free at all, we have played a rigged game in which there are no winners. Here we are in a bingo parlor with a bunch of losing cards and an empty wallet, kids vanished into their own unrealizable dreams, in a house we spent a lifetime trying to hold onto through mortgages and threat of repossession, a dream all too quickly fading from view.

Apart from appreciating the work in and of itself, I was also thinking about this show in light of earlier discussion about visual arts, community, collaboration and sustainability.

From a visual arts perspective I think you can look at how 600 Highwaymen built this show as using the methodologies of social practice to construct the performance. They embedded themselves as artists in the community, chose a text/idea that would be resonant, they locally sourced the performers, doing outreach over time (more than 6 weeks) to identify participants and engage them in the creative process. They built a community and leveraged its resources to implement the project in an affordable, sustainable way. It is a great arts production model that touches on so many relevant issues of the moment. If it wasn’t so late and I wasn’t so tired I would investigate further. Maybe at some point in the near future. But I think this show, like Aaron Landsman’s City Council Meeting, is pointing to an exciting direction for theater/performance.

This Great Country ran pretty late and by the time we got back to The Hub we had already missed a performance by Christeene, which was supposed to be both shocking and enthralling. We managed to stay there talking and chatting til nigh on 2:30AM when we headed back to Tim’s for some rest before returning to The Hub the next day at 10AM.

Saturday started with the Culturebot Hair of the Dog Performance Potlatch where we used the “Long Table” format as the basis for a conversation around art and place. Some of the folks at the table besides me and Jeremy included Caroline Reck of Glass Half Full Theatre and Graham Schmidt of Breaking String, Brian Osborne, Abby and Michael from 600 Highwaymen and a bunch of other folks:

The conversation picked up on a lot of topics we had started the day before: collaboration, community engagement, tour-ability, scalability, sustainable practices.  What really characterized the conversation was a sense of possibility and “can-do” attitude, as opposed to the normal, defeatist, “There’s no money, there’s no audience” litany of complaints so many arts conversations devolve into. We talked about the role art can play in urban development and planning, about the need to be involved in the community at large and be an engaged citizen, about how traditional “marketing” doesn’t really seem to be relevant so much anymore, and a lot more. There seems to be a confluence between artistic practices for creating work and other social/political values.

One thing we talked about is an idea that’s been around for awhile but seems really viable now.  We were talking about the challenges of creating work in places like Austin, Seattle, Portland and Philadelphia -  touring them and also building awareness of that work in bigger cities like NYC, Chicago and Los Angeles. Some of the Austinites were talking about how, since there was a large student population, people would engage deeply for 4-8 years and then move on to other places. We started trying to flesh out the idea of what it would look like if we put some intentionality behind that, thinking about “incubator cities” and leveraging the unique resources of a given city to develop projects. Maybe some cities have a lot of space, others have a certain focus on technology or a certain population… how can we create a development network that lowers creation costs by building a project in the most fertile place? And then having a mechanism to tour. Or how do we build shows that are shows that are designed to tour. This also kind of tapped into idea of cultural biodiversity and how does work  reflect the region in which it is made but retain relevance on a national/international level?

We talked about resource and information sharing – what if there was a web-based clearing house for information on, say, how to build a raft that floats down a river and doesn’t fall apart? Or best practices for community engagement? Some way for artists to share experience and creative practice?

We also had a lively discussion about changing the framework around how we talk about our work, trying to move away from the entertainment/commodity model and associated language and move into something more meaningful. One big thing we talked about for a while was growing audiences and how do we make the case for what we do? It was suggested that what live performance does, ideally, is to provoke not just emotions but thought and critical evaluation of self and society. It opens us up to possibility. In a culture where that is not necessarily highly valued, how do we advocate for mindfulness and thoughtfulness as a cultural value and propose the arts as an agent of that change?

I wish we had recorded the conversation because it was really great – I think people had a good time. I know that we sparked ideas because as we walked away from the table people gathered together in small groups to keep the conversation going. Next time we’ll take better notes and aim to make this an iterative process!

After the Hair of the Dog Performance Potlatch we went into the Hub to see Jaime Salvador Castillo interview Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz about her work, particularly her “Ask Chuleta” project. See below:

It was a really fun conversation with an artist I previously hadn’t known about.

Immediately after that was Culturebot’s final public program of the festival, The Impersonation Game. This is a concept we got from the European collective Everybodys and we were excited to try it out. Basically the idea is simple – you invite Artist A to see the work of Artist B without any pre-knowledge or relationship. Then you do an artist talkback where Artist A pretends to be Artist B. The idea is to open up the possibility for new interpretations of the work and also to give the audience a bit of distance from the artist, hopefully to liberate them to ask questions they might not otherwise broach.

In this case we got three Austin artists – Allison Orr, Graham Schmidt and Kirk Lynn – to pretend to be Gob Squad and answer questions about Super Night Shot. This would have been awesome in and of itself BUT was made even better by the fact that, unbeknownst to us, Kirk Lynn had actually sent his friend Aron to pretend to be him. So Aron pretended to be Kirk pretending to be Gob Squad. Even better than that was that three of the members of Gob Squad were in the audience and even asked their impersonators questions! Jeremy started out interviewing them all and then turned it over to the audience for Q&A. It was very funny but it was also very revealing. We were a little nervous about it at first, but everyone had a great time and thought the conversation was not just fun and funny, but relevant. New Play TV livestreamed it but apparently without audio. Bummer! But here’s a picture of Gob Squad and Impersonators after the fact:

Oh boy oh boy! On the heels of our triumph Team Culturebot went and grabbed some beers and BBQ to pass the time ’til dinner, when we met Tim Braun and Mark (?) and went to Contigo where we stumbled on a crawfish boil:

And then over to some other restaurant for spicy margaritas and delicious melt-y queso.

Thoroughly stuffed and maybe a little bit tipsy, we headed over to The Off Center to check out Brian Osborne’s The WORD: A House Party For Jesus. Brian portrays a down-on-his-luck preacher who got the call as a young boy and knows no other life. Dogged by his past and struggling to keep solvent or at least marginally above abject poverty (both spiritual and material) he wrestles with himself, his God and you. The show really does travel light – a tent, a suitcase and a few props – and it seemed to speak to so many of the ideas and issues we had been discussing all weekend. Osborne was funny even as he inspired pathos as the all-too-human preacher, getting us caught up in the action and singing along to Jesus. Good times! Hallelujah!

Not yet ready to let the good times end, we headed from The Off Center back to the Hub in time to catch the last few songs of Holcombe Waller‘s set. More hanging out, drinking, joking & mingling… and then a crack and a crash and the skies opened up and by gum if it wasn’t a downpour like we hadn’t seen in ages! Everyone headed from the beer garden into the Hub proper just in time for a funky festive freak-out with Foot Patrol, a band led by TJ Wade – a blind singer and keyboard virtuoso who happens to have a strong attraction to feet. Think I’m kidding? Oh no, check it out:

Finally around 3AM it was time to call it a night. We bid adieu to all our friends old and new and braved the downpour to drive pack to Tim’s house for a quick bit of sleep before heading to the airport the next day and back to NYC. Team Culturebot took it to Fusebox and rocked it. Big shout-out to Ron for having us, Tim for hosting us and all the artists, audiences and Austinites for making our trip such a resounding success and funky good time!!

Until next year – stay classy Austin!

John Heginbotham (photo by Amber Star Merkens)

John Heginbotham, a performer with the Mark Morris Dance Group since 1993, a 2012 Jerome Robbins Foundation New Essential Works Fellow, and an all-around New York dance darling, will debut his company, Dance Heginbotham, this week at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, and this summer at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.  Known for quirky, humorous, often dark and wryly theatrical dances that are choreographed to unlikely music choices, he premieres two new works this week, Closing Bell (NY premiere) and Twin (world premiere).  John met with Aaron Mattocks to talk about making dances, being one of the busiest men in show biz, and how he first fell in love with Merce Cunningham.

Aaron Mattocks: My first question is related to John Jasperse, actually.  You performed in his Excessories back in the day, and I was interviewing him for The Brooklyn Rail and talking about how he got from Excessories to the Fort Blossom duet he’s about to show again.  He was telling me how he gets to a certain point with a dance, and it gets performed, and then there’s this thing afterwards that he keeps thinking about, and he realizes that he actually has to go further with it, so he continues investigating.  Trajal Harrell was just interviewing Sarah Michelson in the most recent Performance Journal and she was talking about a similar thing, about Devotion at the Kitchen and Devotion Study #1 at the Whitney, and her process of looking at the last dance and saying “Where did I go easy on myself?  What did I not figure out, run out of time with, or did I get lazy?  What did I fail at?”  Her whole idea for the Whitney Biennial show was basically just two steps from Devotion at the Kitchen–she didn’t know the answer to those two steps.  I’m totally paraphrasing, but she says she just spent a year or so trying to discover and then answer the problems that she left unresolved.  I’m thinking about you, and Twin, and what has come before.  Do you have that same kind of question that you’re trying to answer, that carries over from piece to piece?

John Heginbotham:  I’ve never consciously thought about it in that way.  However, I’m definitely aware that there are themes that show up in my work.  I’ve made up enough things now that I can look at those themes recurring.  For me, a lot of them have to do with a solo figure versus a group.  In Champ that exists, in One-Man Show that exists, in the solo I made up called Waltz Ending that exists, it exists in Twin in a very soft way.  It sort of exists in Closing Bell.  That’s a theme that keeps arising.  I’m assuming that it keeps arising because I haven’t found the answer to that question in a satisfactory way, so it continues to show up and I continue to want to look at it because it’s mysterious to me.  There are other things that are cropping up, having made more pieces.

Something that is a theme outside of the work, that then ends up being inside the work is my nearly 14 years with the Mark Morris Dance Group and hearing Mark’s voice and watching him choreograph so often.  Either embracing his influence, or trying to distance myself from his influence is something that occurs to a greater or lesser degree in every piece.  Also, I would say the idea of character is in nearly every piece.

Aaron: So how did you come up with the idea to work with Aphex Twin?  Does it have anything to do with Alarm Will Sound and their album of transcriptions?  Mark introduced that CD to me several years ago–I think that’s when I first became aware of Aphex Twin’s music.

John: Me too.  The whole way that I even found out about Aphex Twin was through the Alarm Will Sound recording.

Aaron: You didn’t listen to him before?

John: Well, somebody gave me a mixtape in the 90s that had “Bucephalus Bouncing Ball” on it… But here I am, I have to create another piece to go on the BAC program with Closing Bell, and I went through many, many different ideas.  At one point, I considered having a live string quartet on stage; at one point I considered hiring a composer and I went fairly far with that, but it turned out not to be the right direction for this piece.  And then, I remembered this Alarm Will Sound recording, and started listening to the acoustic versions of Aphex Twin, a lot.  I was commissioned to create a solo by a student named Lindsey Jones, at SUNY Purchase, for her senior solo, and decided to use something from Aphex Twin for that.

Then as time was running out for a concept for what I was going to do at BAC, I started listening in a more focused way to Aphex Twin, and decided that if I wasn’t going to have Alarm Will Sound playing the music on stage, that I might as well use the original material,.  And I essentially created a suite of compositions, that felt like one piece.  Aphex Twin, aka Richard D. James, who also composes under other names, is an extremely, extremely prolific composer.  So there’s an extreme amount of material to choose from.

Aaron: There’s something to me that feels natural about your ending up with Aphex Twin, because it has a club sensibility to it.  Not all of it, because there’s several albums of ambient work, similar to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports–he’s just creating sound.  I love that.  But then there are all these heavy, beat based things.  And to me, I guess because of your Fisherspooner background, I see you having a relationship to the club, somehow.  And yet I don’t know that I would call you a club kid…but maybe there’s something about you I don’t know.  I mean, I’m sure there’s lots of things about you I don’t know.

John: I’m like a club grandpa.  (laughter)

Aaron:  But does that come up?  Because you’re doing very rigorous, structured work to this music, it’s not that you’re replicating a night out.

John:  No.  Well, there is one section, which is just the full cast dancing.  No, even that is pretty tightly structured.  I mean, I never was a club kid.  But I’ve ALWAYS been very attracted to electronic music.  Since I can remember.  I like rhythm, and I like a pulse.

Lindsey Jones in Twin (photo by Ted Kivitt)

Aaron: I’m going to try to trap you with something.  As we both know, Mark Morris once famously said, in response to the question “What is your philosophy of dance?”–”I make it up, and you watch it.”  Do you feel that you have a philosophy of dance?

John:  I honestly feel that Mark’s philosophy is such a beautiful philosophy.  It’s very simple.  And what he’s saying is, whatever comes out of him, that’s the piece.  And he doesn’t describe it any further than that.

Aaron: He’s a dance maker.  He makes dances.  We are an audience.  We watch them.  That’s the simple structure.

John: Even though I have some things under my belt now, I still feel fairly new to the world of constant choreography.  So I’m going to rest on his philosophy right now.  It’s a solid structure for the moment–and I like it.

Aaron: The broader, more fair question:  what makes you driven to be a choreographer?  You have such a fantastic career as a dancer…I think about this a lot.  You dance for a while, you get to a point where people ask “Why don’t you try making something?” and for me, I don’t really understand the need to make.  I’m not compelled in a way that I think other people are.  So, what drives you to make?  To be more than a dancer?

John:  Well, I love concepts, and I love puzzles.  Also, it’s not like I danced for a really long time, and then one day late in my career said, “Why don’t I try choreographing something?” I started making up really teeny, tiny dances, probably three years after I started taking dance classes.  I think I was maybe 11 when I first choreographed something, and I loved it.  And since that time, I have regularly made something.  In college in particular, I made up lots of stuff.  But I was always very attracted to the short, short story.  Everything I made up was under ten minutes.

Aaron:  It’s like O. Henry.

John:  It’s like O.  (laughter)

And then there was sort of a hiatus after graduation, when I was starting my career as a performer, but then shortly after that there was always a project.   Why do it do it?  I like ideas, and I like theater in general.  So I like ideas on stage.  That is compelling to me, to put something on stage that’s going to be viewed by myself and other people.  And I like the process of trying to figure out how to make up something that I feel good about.  I never want to show something that I know is bad.  I mean, nobody does.

Aaron: I was just reading your article in Dance Magazine, the “Why I Dance” feature, and you refer to the movie Singin’ in the Rain.  Do you think that the movies have something to do with your interest in the theatrical?  You’ve done music videos, different kinds of experiences, the theatrical concept album show, a cabaret…

John: I love variety in theater.  And I am very interested in a lot of ways of showing performance, and I did grow up watching musicals on TV, in the theater, in the live theater, not just the movie theater.  But I remember the first time I was introduced to the work of Merce Cunningham, I was in high school, and I loved that.  I loved it.  And it was … I’m sorry, that’s not true. (pause) Elementary school.

Aaron: Oh!  I thought you were going to say, “Sorry, that’s not true…I hated it!”  That’s not how that went.

John:  No.  I saw a PBS Dance in America which included Merce Cunningham’s Duets, and I thought, “Oh. Great.”

Aaron: For some reason, when you said “The first time I experienced Merce Cunningham’s choreography…,” I wanted the end of the sentence to be, “…was when I was onstage performing in it.”   I don’t know why, but somehow I imagined you in a tilt being, like, “Oh my god, this is Merce Cunningham.”  That it could somehow be a surprise.  Standing next to Jean Freebury.

John:  Oh my god I LOVE Jean Freebury.  I really love her.

John Eirich in Closing Bell (photo by Amber Star Merkens)

Aaron: So I was talking with Annie-B Parson last night, and with one of her former administrators, who is relocating to Detroit, and he was saying that the part of New York that he doesn’t like is that everybody is constantly busy.  That we have to do so many things to survive, and he was tired of that.  And Annie-B, in this wonderfully positive way, spun it back, and said, “I don’t see it as people being busy, I think New York inspires an incredible productivity.”  There’s something really wonderful about that approach, because I often feel so bogged down with being busy, but I look at you in comparison in order to give myself a bit of a meditation, like, “Thank god I’m not as busy as John!”  You’re dancing full time with MMDG, but there is flexibility, more so than for other members of that company, in the way that sometimes Mark Morris lets you go, and sometimes you let go of Mark Morris.  Also you were dancing with Pam Tanowitz, and you’ve been creating this work Twin.  Why do we take on so much?  Is it just because we love these puzzles, that we love to solve these questions?

John:  Ok, well, this is a super easy question for me to answer.  It’s just, I love it.  I love having that kind of variety in my life. That Pam Tanowitz show was really so fun for me, and so scary. It was very interesting for me to do that show.  I love Mark’s work, and I love being a part of it. And I hope to god that in one sense or another, I will always be a part of that family.  And I love making up dances.

Aaron: I think that’s the perfect place to stop.

Dance Heginbotham

Baryshnikov Arts Center

Thursday, May 10 at 8pm*

*2012 Jerome Robbins NEW Fellows premieres (shared program with Stephanie Batten Bland)

Friday-Saturday, May 11-12 at 8pm

Dance Heginbotham: Closing Bell and Twin

I’ve been thinking about the Itinerant Festival since the opening night at Grace Exhibition Space.  I kept thinking, “Why five boroughs?”  I’ve discussed it with people I know in-the-know and they offer that maybe it helps people who would normally not traverse boroughs to see performance art get their dose close to home. So, although I missed the Queens-based night, I rejoined the traveling performance circus for the Manhattan incarnation at Floor4Art on Saturday, April 28.

I arrived a bit late, but the same bit late that I arrived to the Brooklyn-based night at Grace Space.  I spent seven minutes standing in front of a deli that had the address I was looking for on its banner, but its dark second floor windows didn’t look performance hospitable, and crushed my fantasy of traveling to the secret gallery through the drink cooler.  A tiny wrinkled man began gesturing and saying, “in here, in here,” and graciously led me to the door that I was looking for, three doors north and above an active mosque.  The entryway was beautiful, the check-in table had SunChips and two-liter soda bottles, and I was given a program.  When I stepped in the flamenco dancer was face down on the floor.

Orange plastic tape fences the audience in, facing down a long hallway serving as the performance space.  I’m not sure how many pieces I missed, but I am missing this one, too, as only a few of the forty or so people in the room can see the action.  It looks like there had been something in the lobby a moment ago, but all I catch is some flashing light and crinkling sounds.  I step beyond the orange tape, maneuvering through the crowd, and am struck by the difference in feeling and focus that this borough’s presentation presents. This space is brightly lit, and no one is at the bar.  I hear “We’ve got the moon” or “We are the moon” shouted, and everyone applauds.  I ask one of the hosts who this is and am told “Maria Hupfield.”  I consider going down the long hall and asking the artist if they anticipated the audience not being able to see the end of the piece, if that was a purposeful choice to not be visible to all or just a fate of the space but music begins and it looks like we are going to watch a film.  A blonde in flowered ankle boots catches my eye and I notice that behind her, “ITINERANT 2012″ is scrawled in Sharpie on the white wall.

Seven of us watch the video; everyone else hits the bar or networks/chats.  I miss the title card due to an obstructing pillar.  In the video cut out heads float below a layer that supports various liquids and semi solids appearing, migrating, and disappearing in different formations and permutations while below the heads move, come and go, get closer and farther.  It’s a very pretty collage on film set to a woman singing in a language I can’t name.  I am wondering if the men in the mosque below hear the sound and if the film is next on the bill or between performance filler for atmosphere? The talking and drinking is a bit loud.  I catch the end of the video and there are the names, Negin Sharifzadeh, artist; edit and composition by, maybe Edward. I ponder artists, production, ownership, and creative collaboration.  The film begins again.  It’s on a loop.  I realize this is not the first time the film has run tonight and most people already watched.

In the corner is a very pretty low table with a TV on it and a distinct looking orange wooden chair. A man in a leatherlike jacket with a saw in his hand comes and sits on the chair.  The film goes off, the room goes bright and then dark again.  In the dark the man loads a DVD that begins playing Todlers and Tiaras and then news footage. He turns up the volume to the highest point and holds the remote in his mouth so he can light a candle.  The candle drips wax on his shaking fist and he pretends to change the channels and the DVD runs on the TV. It’s uncomfortably loud and a few of the tightly grouped and quietly attentive audience members plug their ears.  I wonder about the specificity of the selection of clips on the DVD, and imagine that they are carefully chosen otherwise he could have used the regular TV for the performance.  It goes to static then Home Shopping. Static. Dali Lama.  Static.  While he suffers the wax we suffer the uber loud sound and I consider blowing out the candle. I wonder if anyone else is thinking about blowing out the candle, and I think it’s a probability that an audience member at Grace Space may have blown it out. He pulls the saw from his side and begins working at the leg still holding the lit candle in his other hand.  It looks awkward, and like it might take awhile.  The channels/image on the DVD/TV keep changing without his remote input. He stands on the chair and wiggles while sawing until the chair breaks and he falls, the wind on the way down blows out the candle.  He stands up and turns off the DVD/TV. Hector says Miles Pflanz and Miles exits.   Applause.

I am clearly writing in a little book and feel conspicuous so I try to hide my suspicious observation.  I go get some water until “… our next performance will be by Baby Skin Glove” and I end up in the back of the audience, and I can’t see everything.  3 people of various gracefulnesses in artful homespun costumes do diverse renditions of ballet movements.  The one in a neck ruffle is the leader and she lipsyncs to a voice over saying “now ballet is for the masses” with an underscoring of David Bowie’s Under Pressure.  The voice over ballet mistress calls us “little poodles” and the text is very wittily funny.  The two in tutus prance through the audience, the lipsyncer has many rings on graceful hands, and I wonder who wrote this text.  They all form a line and bow, audience applauds.

A woman with much yarn dances and sings in French, then speaks English with a French accent.  “Je suis malade.  Malade! I need you!  Need you!” and such as she wafts around the interior perimeter the audience makes. She tells of a bedridden favorite grandmother who has stories of the past and she hands the audience pieces of her yarn.  She’s inside the yarn like a cats cradle, and the woman of the story is the hero but is in great pain.  She asks the audience to tell her a story, then lays down on the floor.  Is she really asking?  After a moment of silence she gets up. Applause.  That was Marie Christine Katz.

The blonde from earlier is setting up speakers in the corner and says “Hi.  I’m Christen Clifford”.  She tells people they can sit, that she brought her own sound because she didn’t trust the venues, and now she worries that her sound is not going to work either.  Then it works.  She goes into a side room and comes back with a mop that she pushes around the floor, through the audience, grazing my butt.  I worry that I just got dirty mop water on my work pants.  BabySkinGlove is peeking out of the black curtained doorway that leads to ‘backstage’, and it looks like her heavily glamorous clown face is part of Christen’s piece.  Christen hands out big cans of Budwiser while Americana surf rock music cuts in and out with guys voices making dick jokes and other immature chatter.  She returns to the cooler/speaker/ set up and she is shaking.  We listen with her while we drink our beers, and when the guys say “Where’s Chrissy” she points to herself and mouths “That’s me”.  She goes around whispering to some of the audience.  The sound loops for the third time and she passes a cassette tape to the audience.  She asks us to think something nice when we touch it.  We pass it; she stops the sound and tosses all her props into the cooler along with her open beer.  I hope it is empty.  She says “is that tape somewhere”.  It’s only made it ¼ of the way through the audience and she says “wow” and she stands in silence waiting to get it back.  She seems agitated, but I’m not really sure why. I get the tape, it’s called American Dream, the ’60s. She tells us that she’s been thinking about what she has done bad because she was part of a group and she tells through some tears that she has an 8.5 year old and a 3.5 year old and says “I swear I’m fine” and sniffs and dabs her eyes.  She collects the tape.  Applause.  I notice that the face down flamenco dancer is gone.

A woman in a khaki beige outfit comes out and a 3 tier tech cart follows her, she has aviator sunglasses.  She tells the host she is ready to go.  Christen comes out of the green room and says “I need another beer” and I’m shocked at how noticeable everything is in this very quiet and calm environment (the video does not play in the breaks anymore).  Host says this is Marissa Perel for Anthony Romero and I mistake the sound from the mosque below for the sound of the piece.  She assumes an armed raised position and says “You can play #1”. A voice over begins to read a letter about sending a written dance.  The dancer says “Projection 1” and a building illuminates on the wall, “#2” and Strangers in Paradise plays. She does some modern dance light with gesture repetition and step and subtract repeat.   She goes to the tech cart and accidentally plays New Day by Kanye West and says “That’s not part of the show”, but it is now.  She walks into the long hallway and says “play #4”.  She goes up and down, up and down, sunglasses on and the singing of the mosque buzzes my butt through the floor.  She walks out to the entryway and comes back and says “that’s it”.  Applause.  The lights go on bright and people wince.

Last performance, which means I missed two and that at Floor 4 Art in Manhattan shit starts on time.  Clowns are preparing.  There is a videographer with pantyhose over his face and a Hawaiian-ish shirt. A George Foreman grill on paper towels is on the floor next to his high quality camera.  Loudly aggressive house hop sound starts.   Two clowns, Fat Suit Bald Cap and Mustache Towel Apron (not their legal names), begin spraying themselves with baby oil and dancing.  A wince of fear for nice clothing goes through the crowd and FSBC is stomping and storming around going H.A.M. while Mustache Towel Apron squirts baby oil all over his face and chest.  FSBC’s fat suit makes his hard dance moves fascinating.  It’s Mustache Towel Apron’s turn and he gets in some audience members faces and his mustache falls on the brim of my hat.  Nylon Over Face is videotaping and bopping around in convulsions.  Mustache Towel Apron puts his feet up the wall (hands on floor) and pops ass in the air.  Then he comes over and takes the meat in his hands, sits on the floor with a mouthful of it and fans himself with the rest.  It’s a spectacle fo’sho’.  FSBC raps sitting on the floor in an intimate moment with the audience and then they begin to clean up.  People applaud.  “That was Stiven Luka’s Big Rob’s Barbecue” and Hector says “that’s it”.  All artists stand when called by name for a final bow.  Applause.

People stand around talking about their reactions.  They say things like “I was right there with her”, “I was like don’t come near me with that…”, “which was your favorite”.  The video collagist gives me a postcard.  I exit.  No applause.

I missed the following night’s Bronx performances, but I can still catch the group public works show on May 12^th in Queens.  You can too.

Saturday, May 12, 3 – 6 PM Outdoor Performances at 37th Road Pedestrian Plaza – Jackson Heights, Queens