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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE February 19, 1993

Entertainment

Performance artists on the loose in Cleveland

The Performance Art Festival takes over Cleveland during March and April, presenting more than 100 artists from around the world in dozens of venues. The variety of the acts and the artists is considerable, and a number of gay and lesbian performers are scheduled.

The headliner this year is theater legend Ping Chong who will premiere a new work, Undesirable Elements at the Cleveland Play House on March 4-7. Here are some of the other performance artists who will be in town over the next few weeks:

court jester, who dares to tickle you where it hurts most."

Ken Choy has created several performance art characters, including Charlene Chan, Asian drag queen and descendant of Charlie Chan. His work, Buzz Off Butterfly, is a terse commentary on relevant social and ecological issues, a style labeled "no bullshit art."

Patrick Scully is a dancer, filmmaker, writer, and "an HIV-positive queer performance artist. Being queer I am aware of how I am marginalized; being HIV-positive I get more clear on this, and have become acutely aware of my mortality. My work reflects this, is motivated by it, and stands in defiance of mainstream expectations that I should be dead after seven years of

HIV infection, or at least seriously ill."

The Sixth Annual Performance Art Festival takes place in numerous theaters, galleries, museums, clubs, coffee houses, bookstores, street corners and other public sites throughout the area. Check the listings in the weekly entertainment newspapers for a complete schedule, or call 221-6017 for further information.

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Lenora Champagne says, "My work is Multi-media Scarlet Letter premieres at CPT

often about women and how they deal with power and the lack of it, and how sexuality and subversive thinking play into power. Also, inevitably, my work is funny in surprising ways."

Jane Goldberg is performing Topical Tap which is "feminist oriented tap dancing which attempts to deal with serious issues in the upbeat art form of tap material that is relevant but not exclusive to

women.

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Paul Bonin-Rodriguez is a freelance writer and former ballet dancer. He says, "I do my work to justify, to share, to celebrate my position as a gay man. As a MexicanAmerican-Cajun, I am well aware of what it means to be part of amarginalized people. As a not-apparent Latino, I know what it feels like to be marginalized by my own marginalized group. Luckily . . . I'm one funny and optimistic queer who writes a good story and performs it well...

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The Scumwrenches--Jan Bell-Newman and Noelle Kalom--say "The Scumwrenches aim to parody all that which oppresses people worldwide . . . We embrace the courage and the cunning of the

"The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim; he, or she, has become a threat. --James Baldwin

Performance and installation artist Frank Green is developing a national reputation for his graphic portrayals of sexual and medical issues. Amulti-media performance in response to his own HIV diagnosis, The Scarlet Letters, premiering at Cleveland Public Theatre March 18, uses slide and movie projections, audio tape, paint and text. Green dissects Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel as an armature on which to explore issues of concealment, identity, and isolation; to interrogate the imbalance of power in the doctor-patient relationship; and to question the validity of the HIV/ AIDS paradigm.

Sections of The Scarlet Letters were presented "in-progress" earlier this year by Third Avenue Performance Space and the Wexner Center for the Arts, both in

Columbus. The complete work will travel to AKA Artists Gallery in Saskatchewan, and the New Gallery in Calgary, Alberta. after it closes in Cleveland.

Frank Green, a Cleveland native, is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculptural, language, media (film, video, audio), installation, and performance art forms. A native of Cleveland, he studied filmmaking at Kent State University in the 1970's and spent most of the eighties in New York City as a performance poet on the thriving Lower East Side alternative art scene. He moved back to Cleveland in 1988.

Green has also been invited, as one of 50 artists world wide, to perform at the 1993 International Gay and Lesbian Theatre Festival in Phoenix, Arizona, May 27 June 6.

The Scarlet Letters will be performed at Cleveland Public Theatre from March 18 to 21 at 8:00 pm. Tickets are $8 regular, $5 for students and seniors. For more information or reservations, call the box office at 631-2727.

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