ENTERTAINMENT
MAY 14, 1993 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE
25
fire in an empty lot near Cleveland State University. The circles of flame on the pavement and the brushstrokes of fire across a brick wall are ravishing. The audience is free to simply enjoy the magical beauty of fire or reflect on the various meanings it has had in human history.
Loose ends and a beginning
Of the sixteen performances I saw, only four were genuinely unsatisfactory. Jane Goldberg's Rhythm and Schmooze started out as an amusing cabaret act mixing comic routines and tap. When it tried to move towards performance art with a slide lecture about Goldberg's life in tap, it became
the kind of selfabsorbed work that gives performance art a bad name. Scumwrenches, Jan BellNewman and Noelle Kalom, proved to be a pair of not very accomplished dancers whose series
of
sketches were mostly sopho-
moric. Ken Choy's Buzz Off Butterfly was
an unfocused
and insincere Danny Mydlack
piece of work
in which ego and ethnicity were passed off as
art.
The New World Performance Laboratory's Epiphany I (The Germ of a Performance of Faust), a work-in-progress directed by James Slowiak, was a 1960s style collaborative theater piece that seemed mostly self-serving and pretentious. It was unfortunate that this kind of provincialism had to represent Cleveland in the festival. It is too bad that the festival didn't include a larger percentage of "stars" in contemporary Performance Art. I'd certainly have liked to see one or two of the infamous "defunded four," Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, or John Fleck. A short piece by Robert Wilson or Laurie Anderson could have given the festival some of the prestige it was lacking.
Element/Cleveland was exemplary of the qualities of this year's festival. Internationally renowned director, Ping Chong, created a piece using eight Cleveland residents from diverse ethnic or culturally back grounds. The performers brought their personal stories to rehearsal and developed the piece in collaboration with Chong who selected and shaped the material. In the Cleveland Play House's too infrequently used experimental theater the performers sat in a circle of rock salt and spoke into microphones. Their personal histories were woven together into a whole that was rich with the colors of diversity. Foreign language was used like music to punctuate the various stories. The piece reminded the audience of the rich heritage that our city encompasses and the need for us to speak our stories to each other.
This year's Performance Art Festival sprawled both geographically and temporally. Using so many different spaces for the performances was a good idea. Audiences who regularly attend a given theater were exposed to this alternative type of art. I'm told this was particularly exhilarating in the Karamu House weekend that I was unable to attend. Audiences who regularly attend the Performance Art Festival were introduced to the variety of theaters that exist in Cleveland. Finally, the varied possible configuration of performer and audience in both traditional and non-traditional spaces was an important element of the Festival as it is in the aesthetics of perfor-
mance.
Seven weeks is a long haul for the critic. Although I think the rhythm of the festival was good for local audiences, the intensity of a tightly packed two week or ten day festival would allow for more interchange between the
artists to occur and for the possibility of a substantive critical discourse to develop. If the festival is to have national and international credibility, it is important that such discourse be encouraged. Festival director, Thomas Mulready believes the festival is “a kind of training for everybody." He feels that both the public and the traditional art institutions have tended to ignore or marginalize performance art. For him the festival was structured to prepare the audience for the Open, which because it is unselected and uncensored is the "very heart of the festival," from which the next generation of performance artists will emerge.
When it is good, performance art creates
a dialogue with audience. ideas and feelings as well as aesthetic and political issues are explored. We are entertained and engaged by the performance and we celebrate the intimate gift of presence. Mulready was delighted that this year's extensive press coverage focused on "what the art was about rather
than what the art form is." I was
certainly grateful for the variety of points of view I experienced at Cleveland's Sixth Annual Performance Art Festival. The seven weeks offered many graceful and privileged
moments.
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