Theater. What a stupid idea.
Doing a play. A stupid idea.
But, protests my anonymous interlocutor, what about the value of a communal gathering of shared experience in seeing the stories of our world re-imagined in front of us? What about our collective need for stories to understand the world and ourselves? What about the ritual, the drama, the metaphor?

Stories, first of all, are not theater. Same for ritual, drama, metaphor, or whatever else you wanna throw out. These are merely attributes of the gentle washing of our minds. They are the fingerprints on our imagination. They are what allow us to bypass the radical possibilities of performance for the comfort of the familiar. (And act as a little grease for the aisles, too. Slip into this seat, O Patron.) And in a world as cold as theater is for the makers, we tend to take as many comforts as we can.

These things (stories, ritual, etc.) are not attributes of theater — they are only what comes to mind when the subject comes up and by default are often seen as attributes (or even vital fundamental characteristics).

In an earlier version of this disquisition, I began to elaborate on representation as it is commonly (ab)used in “Theatre.” Let’s allow that to pass for now. Because it led me into the fallacies of origins and progress, through the myth of the main stream and into the prison of the “avant-garde.” But still, enacting a story is not, in and of itself, the origin, foundation, essence, primary characteristic, or ultimate goal of theater. Isn’t this obvious, given a cursory glance at theater’s long and cobbled history?

Also:
Must we really distinguish theater from other art forms? Why? Are we confused? Can’t it be all of the above?

While I admit there is some stuff out there that seems to want to do what television can do so well, I don’t think anyone is truly confused about whether it is truly theater or something else. The similarity of some theater to television (for example) comes about as a natural development of an art form under current Western-Global economic conditions. Look for the most efficient mode of making money from this beast and exploit it. (Given’s televisions recent history this mode is somewhat less common, but the exploitation itself of course persists. Like herpes.)

Theater is not what happens on stage (or any other location). Neither is it a primal human instinct for storytelling or exhibitionism. Theater is what happens in our minds: in the minds of an audience. It is our job as theater artists (if we really want to live up to the complex history of that term) to create the conditions in which this can best happen.

If this is the case, which seems to me to be self-evident on my good days, then of course even the most crassly manipulative or thoughtless work can be easily called theater. It just won’t gain any legitimacy from being a well-told story, a pseudo-religious ritual, a metaphoric exploration of human consciousness, or a financial (ha!) juggernaut.

Gotta tell you about this great show I saw recently. It was great theater.

This first installment of what would become our first trilogy took place in the Minneapolis storefront window just below what used to be spacespace in May 1997. This second piece attempted collaboration in a serious way. The three of us worked extensively with the sculptor Stanislaw (Stas) Retinger, developing both ideas and images, for a storefront window.

The original idea came from the Kienholzes’ Pedicord Apartments at the Weisman Art Museum. The larger idea to fill an old hotel with rooms of performance-installation of our own design was adapted to the resources at hand and we found an old office building in the Elliot Park neighborhood of downtown Minneapolis.

Stas constructed a viewing portal in the storefront window with a curtain that rolled up for a “show” every ten minutes. Outdoors on the sidewalk we rigged up a speaker that played the sounds of a shipwreck during a storm at sea. Indoors was a floor covered with river rocks on which stood an old wooden chair and end table. The table barely held a platter covered with fruits, vegetables, and a large stuffed fish, all of which was lashed to the table with rope.

Sitting in the chair was an actor made up in a very fake blonde wig and foam mermaid tale, wrapped from head to fin in white bandages. This mermaid was also bound with ropes to the chair. (This publicity shot was taken just outside the building.)

Across all of this landscape a wild wind blew, scattering bits of white through the air. As the mermaid ate fishsticks and did a crossword puzzle (as well as could be expected while bandaged and tied down), the top half of Jon-Benet Ramsey’s face peered over each frame of the rear office window, which was in nine sections.

This piece took the audience into account in a way the first piece hadn’t. It was created for an audience to take part in as voyeurs, peeking into another space. Drawn either by the crashing outdoor soundscape or curiosity, the audience members would stand and stare for a few seconds or several cycles of the scene. But the audience had to take a step towards us to engage the performance. The performance wasn’t given to the audience, and neither did it provide conventional performance satisfaction: there was little more to take in than the installation — even though it included a (somewhat) active performer. It was in this sense, a melding of visual art and performance.

But this relationship between the audience and the performance was one that we would return to in different forms in the future. In any case, it was a practical example for us of the possibility of engaging the audience in an active role (without forcing them to take part) in the experience of theater.

The space, however, was transformed — and as completely as possible — into an entirely new space. The geometry of the space remained, but little consideration was given to its history or topography. It was an office space, and the contrast of its former use with its current transformation was the link intended to stimulate meaning.

The title, Urban Sirens, was meant to draw parallels between the way we are drawn to the gruesome or sordid (such as the Jon-Benet Ramsey case) and the sirens of myth. Media storms waylay us as we go about our otherwise quotidian lives.

…which I wrote in 1996, when Brooklyn was barely still Brooklyn, not too long after the Mother of All Battles, just before Skewed Visions was formed. There are so many things I would talk more about now, but that’s probably why it remains interesting to me now. It’s all lies but it is all deeply true. (Of course, Skewed Visions performances are refined and delicate flowers and no comparison ought to be made between this tasteless effrontery and our own theatrical wizardry.)

Fountain of Youth, 1996
In a small garage in Brooklyn, New York, a group of young people have been putting on shows since 1993 for whomever will show up. The shows seem confused, anarchic, and sophomoric; they are called things like Barf, and Fuck Off! and usually they last for no more than half an hour. They have received little attention and operate without a budget for publicity. To all intents and purposes, the company (called, at various stages: Poop, Snotrag, Pisspoor, Ralph Mutt, and now Mother of All Theatre Companies (MATC)) seems like one of those adolescent fountains of juvenile expression. However, despite this – or maybe because of it – MATC (in whatever incarnation they happen to find themselves) has been doing shows for almost three years and are attracting a great deal of only local attention (I have been told that the shows “sell out” without advertisement). Having seen two of these shows myself, I would like to pass on the knowledge of their existence because I believe the company embodies a mode of functioning that is an effective model for performing groups.

The artistic force behind this young company is a young woman who calls herself Anita Break. Her real name is Anita Swanson and she grew up in Northfield, Minnesota, my home town. I went to visit friends in New York over winter break, ran into Anita, and saw her company’s productions of Fuck Off! and Barf. The shows ran on consecutive nights in the garage of a friend’s parent.

Barf consisted of a series of skits strung together mainly by the fact that it was the same three actors in each of them. In the first skit three actors sat in a row of chairs, one behind another, facing stage right. At a silent cue all three began doing complicated hand gestures that resembled from what I could see slapping flies, scratching, and masturbation. The gestures grew in proportion and speed until they resembled nothing other than a dance. This level of exertion and complicated choreography continued beyond the point where it became excruciatingly boring and then petered out, until a sort of hostile stillness reigned.

This led directly into the second skit. One of the actors slid off his chair, another slowly stood up and the third continued to sit. This actor began a long theoretical speech but acted as if she were going into a bathroom in an elementary school as a child, complete with asking the teacher, walking down the hall, and all the more explicit associated activities, performed explicitly. The third actor continued to stay on the floor but began licking everything in sight including an audience member.

The third skit began when the third actor began to actually wretch. The other two slowly stopped what they were doing and watched in alternating boredom and fascination. Barf ended abruptly when an alarm clock went off. The actors stopped “acting” and stood where they were.

Fuck Off! was less formal. It consisted of a line of actors rushing in and out of the garage, around the yard, and from the roof of the house screaming obscenities and gibberish at each other, the audience, passersby on the street, and then at various objects in the garage, including a television screen that showed first various sitcoms, news, and a pornographic video. When the pornography had been on for some time, the actors slowly became distracted by it, then absorbed by it, then bored by it, then angry with it until they began to shout Fuck Off! at the television.

These shows were attended by probably twenty to thirty people which was quite a crowd for the garage space. The audience, mostly teenagers and young adults (although somebody’s parents were there and seemed to accept what was happening without qualms), reacted positively. Some laughed, some applauded, some gasped; but all seemed to enjoy it and no one objected to the immaturity as far as I could see. It is difficult to reconstruct the elaborate and careful structure and design of these pieces in words. The rough edges are easier to describe. But in this combination I found a parallel to a true beauty. Somewhere beyond prettiness or cleanliness there is a beating heart and it is bloody.

The work done by MATC is youthful: immature, puerile and silly, but its youth is its strongest point. Like youth, the shows MATC puts on are straightforward yet complicate what they come into contact with. It is flexible, raw, playful and rough. Most of all the company claims the joy and play inherent in obscenity and puerility: an adolescent pimply insight into the inextricable ugliness and beauty of passion.

MATC shows get done regularly, attract a consistent following, and the company manages to support itself through donations at the door. No one makes any money, but then no one expects to. The two shows I witnessed were fascinating because they seemed to open a door to performance that restructured certain rules of theatre. In a way that is theoretically astute and cohesive with much work in performance historically and being done today, Anita and her crew of unruly teenagers acted as a catalyst for work that I am doing, both in writing and performance.
To this end, I asked Anita to write something for me so that I would have a resource to refer to in writing about MATC’s shows. This is what she sent me (hers was handwritten):

Mother of All Theatre Companies: A Manifesto
Hurry up please it’s time. Of expansion: viral, creeping, shambling, disorganized and weedy. Of a dog about to vomit: before the habit sets in, before the indifferent beak could let her drop. Off the top of the rollercoaster before the plunge where climbing is falling is not moving at all. The scratch of the rat making another hole in the nest. The crackling of highspeed photography. Of explosive decompression. Of internal combustion. Into the heart of an immense darkness. Crawling under fingernails, leaving a trail of regurgitated dust. The worms crawl in the worms crawl out the worms play pinochle on your snout. When “snot” and “poop” are meaningful words filled with insidious intent. Saying, “What a beautiful pussy you are, you are.” And meaning it. Obscenity, queen of the sophomoric heart, come to me. I will cry your adolescent tantrum to beat at the hearts of the sane and mature. Puerility, inanity, obesity, our time has come. What happens when an immovable force meets an unstoppable object? A silent rate of motion, where stillness is absolute speed in a room without air. A space of location where stasis is absolute direction. The space between events where nothing happens again. Personnel without personality. I am. I are. I is.

Just thought I’d been sounding crankier than usual lately so I’d say this: I’m getting excited about having a bunch of people singing.

This one has been in my head for a while. Not sure if it’s really related to the show, but when you’re fishing you need some bait. (At least I think you do, not being a fisher. Or a fish.)

And for some reason it makes me happy. Maybe I need a ukulele chorus…

Plus, looking back at those Giacomelli pix just gives me a little tingle!

Without getting into it at all, I would like to put something out there: there is not enough time to have it all.

And I resent that.

Plus, in my head the space is so much bigger.

And, in my imagination the wilds are so much wilder.

In my salad days when I was green in judgment, I read this book and it made a great impression on me. As did most of the books I read in my salad days. Now, no sooner is a book closed than it is forgotten. Soon no sooner opened than obliterated.

In any case, I checked it out from the local library recently to moisten my lips after the drier substances with which I have recently dusted myself.

Then — guess what? I watched the 1983 movie version. Eh, not so good. I tried limply to find the 1992 film that features John Hurt, called Lapse of Memory, but failed.

So I resorted to the 21st century’s Book of Knowledge, the internet, and read several summaries, analyses and reviews of Robert Cormier’s YA book.

There are certain themes that I like and that resonate with this Black Water project that is hesitating in the ether. The loss of identity, the uncertainty of others, the pervasive societal alienation, the threat and presence of violence, the repetitive motion — or the replaying of cyclic episodes, the unreliable narrator, the projection of a fantasy as a reality, and so on. Very late 1970s.

These things may tie in nicely with my recent obsessions over my sense of cultural amnesia and denial, coupled with a looming sense of fatality.

Is all this just the usual lefty paranoid fantasy of a simultaneously receding and encroaching faceless, usually rightist, armageddon?

I was just listening to a brief interview with Alice Sebold on Fresh Air this morning and she was asked why she wrote a book, The Lovely Bones, about “something so horrible, so unthinkable.” She answered: “Because it’s part of life. [...] It’s very much part of the experience of what it is to live in this culture. It happens all the time.”

Maybe it is enough to want to be aware of the world, and to want to share that desire with others.

CUBICLE is an online series of “site-specific podcasts.”

What the hell?

(I hear you cry.)

Didn’t you just recently aver in this forum that “it is time to shed the term to save the idea?” And then you announce this effort that you say asks “what is ’site-specific’ ” and “is there a way of making [it] online.” Unless you’re completely stupid you must realize how insincere this makes you look with all your spewings about the importance of artistic integrity. Well, my friend, you’ve had your time. Your little online video project is just another uninformed attempt to capitalize on the potential money and audiences of the web. Well, we’re all dying here: move the fuck over.

(I hear you cry.)

No, you foul-mouthed reactionary. It isn’t and I won’t.

1. While it is true “site-specific” has become emptied of its meaning, and

2. while it is true that for quite some time the term has not appeared at the head of our website, and

3. while it is also true the three of us have been both publicly and privately hedging this term,

4. it is also true that I am rubber and you are glue.

5. That’s right. I don’t play baby games, I eat them. GRRAAARRRGHHHH!!!!!

Cubicle is both an attempt to create site-specifically and an attempt to leave the term behind. A term has its own life, you know. It is harder than we tend to realize to choose our own words. What we really need is both an abandoning of the term and a re-commitment to the principle.

But what the hell is your so-called principle, you slippery piece of…

(I hear you cry.)

Here, without using the words, how about this. Some things involved:
constant crisis,
disillusioned revolution,
dismissive questioning,
illicit adaptation,
fundamental mutability,
thoughtless sacrifice,
and…

…this is making me tired.

Look. If you just make a play, a performance, a piece, whatever, then you shoot it with your handy new camera and edit it up a bit (try for some sexy close-ups and silhouettes), then put it up on a website — you do not have a work of art.

You have a representation of a work of art (if it made it there in performance in the first place, which I’ll be the first to admit mine do not always achieve).

You have a fargin PRODUCT.

If you make it with the idea of presenting it as an online video performance, you’re in the neighborhood.

If in making it you investigate not only what is possible at this site and in this space, but what this site and space allows, what kinds of movement they produce, what kind of thought is prohibited, encouraged, disguised, deflected, etc. If you investigate things of this sort in the actual PRACTICE of MAKING this thing — not just thinking about it up front or rationalizing it after the fact — then you are welcome to take whatever term you like, but in my book you’re taking part in the ongoing process of art’s own “permanent motion and transformation of thoughts and ideas.” And THAT is worth all the hassle.

Congratulations. You beat me to it.

This one took place in a bathtub.

And it is the only one where we don’t seem to have any pictures, video, or even text documenting our splash on the Minneapolis performance scene.

Sean had been working with a group calling themselves The Conspiracy earlier and he managed to wangle us a spot in the Walker Art Center’s Out There series, then held at the Southern Theater and called ARTCORE. This was January 1997 and the event was meant to be inspired by the rave scene. We shared the stage with Hijack, among others. (But I had no access to drugs.)

The piece had a script. A monologue from an early piece by Ruth Margraff (fresh from a Jerome Fellowship at the Playwright’s Center) — The Locket Diaries, I believe. This one was based on the character from La Dame Aux Camelias, dying in a bath.)

In any case, the thing took place in the Southern Theater during an event that lasted through the night and into the late AM. Bands, dancers, theater, more bands, more bands…

She walks down those house steps (which at the time were the old risers) onto the stage, speiling a monologue with a sheet around her shoulders like a cape. Or a towel. As she continues to the stage floor many feet below, the cape continues to flow behind her. It is long. Some dozen sheets sewn together. She trails it behind her and climbs into the clawfoot tub sitting in the middle of the stage.

You see I can’t even remember the words.

Then she steps into the tub, which had been filled with water. In 1997, in January, in Minnesota…

At one point she lifted the cape around her and held it up. Suddenly moving images of a man and a woman (yes, from the movie version. I think it was the Garbo one) appear across the sheet. Then she faints into the tub, splashing water across the stage.

She rises again, more extravagant words. Faints again. Splash.

Repeat.

This was about the object, not the space. Site-specific to a bathtub in its own way, I guess. The towel/cape/sheet. The inescapable materiality of water and the metal tub (weighed a ton. We had to haul it in and out.)

But that relationship between the water and tub and the performance space, the stage, is a useful one to hold on to. There’s an element of surprise that happens as a part of this, and it could potentially lead to a focus on spectacle over substance.

The spectacle is not the point. But the surprise is when you are forced to see something from a slightly different angle. No, you are Allowed to experience part of the world somehow more Immediately.

Does this lead to better thinking?

Was this thought manifested on a stage?

How did the stage work?

Was the tub the stage?

What does it mean to have a real object as a “stage”?

What does “performance” mean in this case — “theater”?

Here’s where the rubber hits the road: the “reality” of the object and its relation to what happens on (or in) it.

Because when you figure this out, you’ve got your own definition of theater, of art, of what it means to make your work. How and why you do it.

Cause after all, even though we all know (or at least, some of us) that imitating television on stage will lead you merely to poor television, merely wanting to do Something Different is not enough. Why do you do what you do, why, and what does it mean?

Maybe you think I’m jes sittin on myass heah?

I am, writing this at nearly 3 in the blessed AM, because I’ve been siting here making some money to pay the bills.

And I’ve been trying to think as I type and slog, about this platform in my head made out of small and old boards.

What’s that all about?

Not sure. If I get a chance to make one as a trial in the next few days (before the holidays chase me back into the land of the living) I’ll see if I can’t get a pic up here to see what’s what.

Hey.

Yes, we’re a part of the drive to raise money for non-profits via GiveMN.org.

If you donate money — any amount — this Tuesday, November 17, from 8:00am until 8:00am the next day, the money is matched. See the fine print for details, but the truth is we would appreciate your support on any day of the week.

Times are hard for us too, and you know with Skewed Visions you get a big bang for the li’l buck.

Thanks.