Show People: Downtown Directors and the Play of Time (review)

"Only being a tourist can you experience a place" is painted on the floor along with amorphous black shapes and pink surrealist breasts behind the strings that crisscross the space. This quotation from Richard Foreman's 1976 Rhoda in Potatoland appears an extremely apropos comment for the viewer at Show People: Downtown Directors and the Play of Time, an exhibit at New York's Exit Art. The show focuses on the work of six theatre artists "whose work has proved central to the evolution of a 'Downtown' aesthetic and artists' community over a span of four decades" (according to the press release), and explores the nature of archival work in the theatre, allowing five of the six included directors each to curate their own space, as a reflection of their own theatre practice.

Foreman is included in this exhibit, along with Anne Bogart, Robert Wilson, Meredith Monk, Peter Schumann, and Reza Abdoh. This is certainly an important group of figures. However, the absence of such figures as the Wooster Group's Elizabeth LeCompte, Mabou Mines's JoAnne Akalaitis and Lee Breuer, or the Performance Group's Richard Schechner is notable, especially since all of these figures are arguably more downtown New York than Reza Abdoh, who was well established in Los Angeles before his first productions in New York, or Robert Wilson, who quickly shifted uptown to the Metropolitan Opera with the 1976 Einstein on the Beach.

Along with the installation-like spaces, Exit Art has collected a phenomenal video archive of the work of these directors. The viewer can sit in the café and view any of the dozens of films available, ranging from rarely seen gems such as Foreman's Rhoda in Potatoland, Bogart's History is an American Dream, and Abdoh's Tight Right White to films like Wilson's Deafman Glance,Monk's Ellis Island, and Schumann's Brother Bread, Sister Puppet. Anthology Film Archives is also presenting a wide collection of films in connection with this exhibit and branching out to include other icons of the downtown New York arts scene. This incredible exhibit and video series truly evokes the power of the downtown New York theatre and the incredible breadth and inventiveness that has sprung from within these few city blocks. By pairing the more traditional performance archive of time-based video with the spatially configured archives designed by the directors, Exit Art challenges the viewer to ask how theatre is best remembered. This joint archiving process brings the viewer into the minds and worlds of these directors far more effectively than a simple video would.

Over the past decade, there have been a large number of exhibits focusing on performance art and conceptual art—Exit Art's own 1995 Endurance: The Information and the 1998 Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art are just two of the most important. However, theatre has remained largely underrepresented within the museum space. In seeking to address this issue, Exit Art co-founder Papa Colo and curator Norman Frisch have created a space in which both those new to the work of these iconic figures and those who recall the [Begin Page 163] productions cited can explore the artistic development of a "downtown aesthetic" while considering the questions of "performance remains" which are so prevalent in contemporary scholarship.

This exciting exhibit allows the viewer to step inside the brains and aesthetics of these key figures in the contemporary theatre. The first room one encounters is the Foreman exhibit. Like his set designs, he has built a space crammed with ideas and images. Foreman captures the busy-ness of his productions by borrowing some of his recurrent props, including an illuminated sign reading "Ego: On the Air" and a television broadcasting his own head, shot from beneath in a wide angle to give the viewer...