Performance Strategies: Interviews with Ishmael Houston-Jones, John Kelly, Karen Finley, Richard Elovich

performance notes Performance Strategies Marc Robinson At its outset every artistic movement is at a loss for words. As an old aesthetic gives way to a new one, the vocabulary describing it also dissolves. Right now, artists and spectators alike are still searching for the shared, comprehensive language necessary to discuss and evaluate New York's newest performance. The eclecticism of current artistic strategies has yet to produce as diverse a range of analytic ones. While the success with which young artists elude most standard labels and categories attests to the vitality and unpredictability of their experimentation, too much work is passed over for lack of sustained dialogue. This deprives artists of perspective on their own development and audiences of an active engagement with the culture. Perhaps artists themselves can help. I spent much of last winter going to see the work of New York's newest avant-garde-the works-in-progress, finished pieces, even some rehearsals. After seeing a range of work, I selected four artists who are representative of various trends in performance and discussed numerous issues with each of them. We focused first on methodology-rehearsal processes, sources for material, styles of writing and performance structure-then moved on to broader topicsdevelopment (or rejection) of character, images of gender and sexuality, politics, and links with their peers and predecessors. Out of our conversa31 tions, I assembled the following statements, hoping that the concerns raised by the artists would refresh the dialogue surrounding their work, and that their stories of personal development would determine a context for their evolving aesthetic. Instead of locating just one context, I discovered several. I didn't hear the shared language that I hoped to; and, in spite of strong temptation, I couldn't fully combine all their work into one picture reflecting the spirit of the times. But the failed expectation provided an important lesson. The idea that such a Zeitgeist must exist betrays the assumptions of an earlier era: it's not an adequate term for today's alternate culture, presuming a cohesiveness that the diversity of this work does not embody. New artists share only an aversion to a theatre of soulless formality, ennervating predictability , and pretentious elitism. An all-inclusive reflection of the world has otherwise been replaced with myriad individual responses reflecting personal histories and attitudes. Terminology has also splintered into many separate languages, four of which appear here. The absence of a common language perhaps reveals the chief virtue of contemporary performance. It suggests that each of today's artists is still working out his or her own approach to performance, proceeding by trial and error rather than by proven plan or inherited style. In an age when much experimentation is slick and ossified, the difficulty these four people faced in trying to generalize about their newest work indicates that some artists still know how to experiment. 32 ISHMAEL HOUSTON-JONES In a recent program note Ishmael Houston-Jones lists over fifty "major influences " on his work: among them are the AIDS epidemic, the fall of Allende, the Jonestown suicides, the Nicaraguan Revolution, and Palestine and the Palestinians. He also lists Meredith Monk, Yvonne Rainer, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, and Singin' in the Rain. The program gave him away: Houston-Jones makes that rare hybrid, socially-conscious dance. His most recent piece, Them (seen in a new version last fall at P.S. 122), is representative of his performance style. Them depicted various dynamics of male relationships-from symbiosis through combat. As novelist Dennis Cooper read a text describing brutal attachments and aborted encounters, the six performers danced patterns of approach and retreat to Chris Cochrane's harsh electric guitar score. The men regularly met in pairs or trios, moved into gentle contact improvisation, then usually leapt into violent pushing and pulling, clinging and shoving away. Tension pervaded the entire piece, making even the most fluid movement look anxious. Sometimes that anxiety became visible when a man wielding a stick chased a couple till they fled, or when a blindfolded Houston-Jones desperately wrestled a dead goat on a dusty, bare mattress. It became most explicit as the piece ended: all six performers stood...