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• • • A Crash of Symbols F ranklin Furnace reeked like a real-life furnace, the bite of something gaseous getting stronger as we entered the basement. Now we'd rub two performers together and-blow up the joint? Sherman Fleming and Kristine Stiles entered from behind a white screen, taking awkward baby steps because they were pressed up against each other, holding a board between their naked bodies. Once they were front and center, this black man and white woman began drumming their hands over each other's backs and buttocks, changing rhythms but slapping in unison. Intimate yet separated by that slash of plywood, they were a living hieroglyphic for "black/white" and "man/woman." At the Furnace, it looked more absurd than incendiary, but in other contexts (other states, other neighborhoods) such activity could start a fire and alarum. I'm speaking in metaphor, of course. But then, this was a piece about language, though no words were spoken. Fleming and Stiles had separate manifestos in the program notes, outlining their mutual concern with issues of "logos and hysterias." Both are intellectuals who've obviously waded much further into the poststructuralist gobbledygook than I have, so I'm going to simplify them into the lowest common Derrida: Language doesn't just describe reality, it creates reality. If you're black or female (those proverbial Others ), you're a born symbol. You're going to travel through life in a box that throws a shadow wherever you go. Walk onstage and that shadow goes with you. Only straight white men get to be the blank slates who can write anything on themselves, and that's probably how they become the "great artists" we've heard so much about. After the drumming prologue, Fleming and Stiles put on shirts and jeans and began constructing Western History as a Three-Story Building. They'd been inspired by Ishmael Reed's metaphor in Mumbo Jumbo. A Crash of Symbols 169 Reed described Western history as: a store dealing in religious articles; above that a gun store; above that an advertising firm specializing in soap accounts. That's capitalism, I guess: selling things to die for; selling things to die with; selling things to clean it up. While Stiles set up rows of Coke bottles holding red candles across the back of the stage, Fleming placed silver bowls full of glowing charcoal across the front. Here was the source of the mysterious smell. She lit the candles, while he hung Coke bottles full of water over each silver bowl. Water splashed onto the embers. Now we had smoke in the front, fire in the back, grit on my notebook. The performers went backstage for big piles of onions and greens, which they diced with meat cleavers on two podiums, and then turned on the fans that had been sitting on the podiums. It smelled great, a ritual in Sensurround. Fleming began to make an enormous cat's cradle of white ribbon, running the strands from wall to wall. Stiles stood at a blackboard with an armload of too many books, writing, "Ain [sic], end, drift, target, prey, quarry, game, view ..." illustrating that words can only be defined by other words, creating a slippery unreliable trail. Then she made pictograms. She erased, wrote, erased. Meanwhile, Fleming attached flowers and bells to the white ribbons. The candles burned down. My eyes were smarting now from the onions and the smoke. And Stiles was writing, "Scars = certain elements of reality." So ended the religious section, with the space converted to a swamp of water puddles, onion bits, Coke bottles, and white lines. The performers changed into formal wear and blindfolds. Precariously , the white woman wearing sequins and pearls carried the black man wearing a tux. They fumbled for the fans and the cleavers, placing these objects on the floor. They careened into the ribbons, made mush of some clutter. He, the taller and heavier, struggled to collapse himself into piggyback position. She struggled to hold him up. This was the moment with emotional impact, as they took their chances on the obstacle course, looking like unwanted guests at the prom. And so they did their damage as a unit, a bull deconstructing the china shop. In the last section, they advanced slowly toward the audience while holding a pole between them. From it dangled shards of glass and mirror -blinding, jangling. Behind them, slick magazine ads flashed over the screen. I doubt if they intended this, but...

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