The Idea of Switzerland by Walter Abish, and: Hegemony Hodge Podge by Beth Anderson, and: Night Voices by Douglas Davis (review)

Ically commented upon the Illusions and myths of love. My favorite sequences were her reading from Freud's text on love and hypnosis, for which she donned male attire, *and her aiming arrows at a video heart as a voice-over spoke of a dying heart patent's new hope-a transplant-for treatment of a broken heart. Hammer's piece, like Damon's, was highly personal, yet she seemed to articulate a more creative space for herself in the process-a sort of "open heart" space. What was so Interesting about Rosemary Hochschild's performance at the Mudd Club, in contrast to the two previously mentioned pieces, was that she situated her piece very much within the world, wryly commenting on - and criticizing that world with wit and irony rather than with the mythic images or selfconscious seriousness of Damon or the selfindulgence and private language of Hammer. The myths Hochschild addressed were social: the goddess conjured up was not the archetypal earth mother, but the Madison Avenue idol, Georgette Klinger. A magazine ad featuring Klinger and her daughter was projected onto a screen. The mythology of commercial advertising-"buy these products and you will be beautiful," and the promotion of a cool, stereotyped, artificial beauty-was satirized by Hochschild addressing this image in various voices: that of a working class South African girl who determinedly wants to be a movie star ("gotta make up my face if I'm gonna be a movie star. A movie star in New York City"), and that of Klinger herself. Coming forward to a table with makeup mirror and donning high heels, she, while applying make-up, told the story of an upper-class "tragedy.": how the family's Bantu maidservant, brought over with great difficulty from South Africa, abandoned them at the instigation of other maids in Central Park and went to work for Harry Belafonte. While assuming poses-one of the classic ways of being in the world for women-she subverted the stereotypes, showing the alienation in them. She dealt to a degree with how women are socialized, and how media manipulations become internalized and alienate us. In contrast to Hammer's and Damon's focus on Inner questions-Hochschild placed her alienated self in the world outside herself, and demonstrated her struggle against stereotypes in a social, as opposed to personal, context. Lenora Champagne Walter Abish, The Idea ofSwitzpdand. Beth Anderson, Hegemony Hodge Podge. Douglas Davis, NightVoices. Franklin Furnace (February). The January Performance Series at the Franklin Furnace carried the title Words and Music which was a nice umbrella, vague enough to encompass almost any contemporary performance, yet seeming to bristle with specifics. Walter Abish's prose does have that special rhythm and assonance which invites a "musical" description. But a straight-forward reading is not a performance when the reader is not a performer (no vocal exercise, no chanting, no sense of ritual, no action-only a writer reading with a sore throat), no matter how (very) provocative the material. The F.F. deserves credit for providing an audience for a writer of Abish's obvious merit-but his work deserves attention as literature, not performance. The series' moniker was more direct with Douglas Davis's Night Voices and Beth Anderson's Hegemony HodgePodge; the pieces may be poles apart in the arena of theoretical assumption, but they stand sideby -side in their respective concerns for the affective powers of verbal and non-verbal sound. Davis's urban orientation paid more attention to the politics of sound technology, while Anderson's was pastoral, focusing on theemotive interplay of the structureand content of sound. Davis performed in collaboration with avoice broadcast over WBAI Radio. Those with their dials tuned-in heard only the radio voice, while the F.F. audience was privy to both the sounds of the radio and Davis's resistance. Using elements of radio melodrama and science fiction, Davis's performance developed along a fairly conventional plot line. NIGHT VOICES The radio voice boomed its presence with a muscle-bound display of Big-Brotherish insight and infiltration, of fact and evidence, of cajole and threat. It was a full-fledged battle of the wills, with...