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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE MAY 14, 1993

ENTERTAINMENT

Representing diversity: Performance Art Festival 1993

William Roper

Canyon Sam

Leonora Champagne

Kain Karawahn

Goat island

Reviewed by Barry Daniels

Giving voice to artists who represent groups at the margins of our society was the great strength of Cleveland's Sixth Annual Performance Art Festival which came to an end on April 19. This was director Thomas Mulready's most ambitious festival to date. It consisted of seven weeks of programs located in diverse Cleveland theaters as well as several non-traditional spaces. A panel of distinguished museum and performance space directors selected 25 individual artists or groups who appeared on 18 bills. There were an additional 50 acts presented during the five night Performance Open.

Performance art

Although performance art has a long history, it emerged in its current forms in the late 1960s when traditional gallery artists--conceptualists and minimalists--began experimenting with performance as a new form of gallery presentation. In the 1980s writers exploring the possibilities of storytelling and autobiography began experimenting with performance as a new kind of theatrical presentation. Laurie Anderson's work is representative of the move from gallery show to theatrical presentation. Her early work developed out of her training as a visual artist. In the 1980s she added autobiography and narrative to her repertory, finally developing large scale, technologically complex performances that combine the visual and the verbal with experiments in pop musical forms.

As RoseLee Goldberg, historian of performance art, has noted, "By its very nature, performance art defies precise or easy definition beyond the simple declaration that it is live art by artists." That is, unlike traditional gallery art or traditional theater, the creator-artist is present in the work which is thus a "performance."

Some impressions: a collage

Feminist Voices. The Best Things in Life by New York based Leonora Champagne is a poetic collage of personal memories and emblems from myth, fairy tales, and pop culture. It effectively communicates the sense of frustration a young woman feels when she confronts the sexist implications of so much of the material that informs her growing up. "If Snow White and Eve both eat an apple, are they the same woman?" she asks. "If paradise is over, what do they wake up to?" In excerpts from Sex Secrets, Heidi Arneson from Minneapolis wittily takes us into the world of teenage"girl" sexuality. It is a very funny piece and Arneson is adept at creating a varied group of characters from her own childhood. More importantly she speaks to the reality of women's sexuality and to experiences that have not traditionally been given voice in our maledominated culture

The Politics of Race. Canyon Sam, a Chinese-American woman from San Francisco, presents The Dissent. In a quiet, centered, delivery, she tells the story of going to China to explore her heritage and winding up in India fighting the Chi-

nese oppression of Tibet. She had "sought wisdom in China and found justice in Tibet." The narrative builds slowly but achieves a remarkable intensity as she describes the plight of Buddhist nuns in Tibet. The audience listens raptly and bursts into applause at the end.

Gay Lives. Texas born, Mexican-Cajun American, Paul Bonin-Rodriguez' Talkofthe Town presents a fictional character, Johnny, a gay teenager, growing up in Cedar Springs (pop. 2413), Texas. Bonin-Rodriguez is a storyteller of great personal charm. His comic vignettes are deeply rooted in the experience of every teenage boy who has confronted homophobia in his environment. There is a poignancy to the laughter: it is the humor that makes the pain endurable. Queer Thinking is a deeply personal and profoundly political piece by Minneapolis artist Patrick Scully. Paradox is at the heart of his performance. His manner is often as restrained as his content is defiant. He confronts the political issues of being queer while trying to suppress the anger that facing these issues arouses. He is tall, blue-eyed, blond, with a dancer's body, and hung; he was diagnosed HIV positive seven years ago. He juxtaposes egoism and activism. As Scully has stated, "Queer Thinking is about getting clear on things and then speaking my mind." It charts the trajectory from the personal to the political that is an important aspect of the gay rights movement.

Violence and Dance. Can't Take Johnny to the Funeral by Chicago collaborative group, Goat Island, is a dance-movement piece inspired by the question, "To be an American do we have to accept violence?" It is an oddly moving collage of movement taken from sport, military manoeuvres, and gangster films that evokes a sense of fear for the relentless and incomprehensible violence in our world. It is the single piece in the festival to represent the dance-performance art tradition from the Judson Dance Group in the 1970s.

Musical tales

The multi-media musical performance mode is represented by Danny Mydlack and William Roper. Mydlack portrays a fey and gawky teenager wearing oversize Bermuda shorts and sneakers. He performs a sampler of his amusing work that starts from sketches and often develops into songs. In the sweetest of the pieces, "Story," he covers his bare chest with shaving cream and tells the story of a little boy who likes to draw pictures, drawing a sequence of pictures in the shaving cream to illustrate the narrative as it unfolds. He uses a variety of quirky props including a boombox helmet, a ten foot inflatable dick that floats over the audience, and a sideways TV which allows him to sing a duet with a film of his mouth.

African American tuba player and composer William Roper presents three short pieces that combine poetry, music, and reflections on the African American experience. His performance is hurt by the fact that the audience at Peabody's Down Under is clearly waiting for the second performer on the bill, David Thomas of the rock group Pere Ubu. Thomas proved to be a charismatic musician, but his set of songs hardly qualified as performance

art.

Visual thinking

Kathy Rose's Kabakimenco Visual Theatre is enchanting and is appropriately staged at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Dancer Rose performs in front of film maker Rose's abstract animations. References to various sources in the modernist tradition place her work in a historical context while the artist makes us reflect on the relation between movement and painting, between the flat surface and the three dimensional performer.

From Berlin, fire artist Kain Karawahn, accompanied by a guitarist playing droning minimalist rock music, draws pictures with