Figures in a Field

More as installations of various art performances than testimony to my theory I fashion what follows. The figures installed are culled from L.A.'s performance art scenes, which are as dispersed as the city's built-environment and its more or less segregated cultural terrains. Johanna Went has presented her performances most frequently in Chinatown's and mid-Hollywood's punk and new wave music clubs, which she prefers over the regular theater venues.^[12] The trio formed by Toti Mercadante O'Brien, John O'Brien, and Steve Roden has staged performances in art galleries, museums, studios, garages, and a friend's backyard. Their home base “at the Brewery project,” an alternative gallery run by John O'Brien, is located in the northeast corner

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of downtown L.A. Oguri and his life and career partner Roxanne Steinberg, with their dance company Oguri and Renzoku (meaning, in Japanese, “continuum”), have a standing artistic residency in La Boca, a chapel turned warehouse theater-and-dance workshop founded by Sarah Elgart at the Sunshine Mission/Casa de Rosas, which provides shelters in South Central L.A. for women in transition.^[13] The group has performed in museum courtyards, public plazas, proscenium theaters, and loft spaces. osseus labyrint has frequented all sorts of enclosed and open-air performance sites, ranging from hotel lobbies, deserted mansions, black-box theaters, to the concrete-filled riverbed of Los Angeles River. The company'sperformance outings track the path of artistic nomads in L.A.: their cars are their horses, their curatorial sponsors the green pastures, and their spectators the life-sustaining water.

As art performances, the majority of works produced by these artists have at most a covert relationship with their individual identities. But the personal backgrounds of these performers, like the frame that supports the painting or the fringe that contaminates the center, do add interesting footnotes to their art. Fact Number 1: most of these artists were originally out-of-towners or foreign-born. Went grew up in Seattle; Toti O'Brien is Sicilian and her husband John O'Brien was born in Japan and grew up in Italy; Oguri is from Japan; Hannah Sim and Mark Steger started osseus labyrint in San Francisco. Fact Number 2: many of these artists never anticipated becoming performance practitioners when they grew up. They worked at odd jobs, traveled incessantly, or pursued other art disciplines until one day they stumbled across a performance artist or a theater/dance workshop that accidentally changed the course of their lives. Fact Number 3: all of them have settled in L.A. because they discovered in this unpredictable and sprawling city divergent pockets of support that have enabled them to present performances without depending on the box-office intake. Many of their performances are supported by (very) modest grants and open to the public for free or a small price. They all have found semiregular day jobs roughly related to the city's entertainment or educational industries in order to subsidize their art. Unlike New York City, L.A. imposes no stigma on “professional” artists who regularly work only parttime on their crafts.^[14]

Went was a store clerk in Seattle before she met her mentor Tom Murrin, the Alien Comic, whose anarchic humor so inspired her that she began doing guerrilla performances on the streets with the Balloon Theater, which in the early 1970s featured actors in androgynous makeup building “huge floating structures out of helium-filled balloons.”^[15] Went also joined Murrin's North America-Europe tour with DWARF (or, Theatre That Doesn't Get in The Way), producing improvisational actions in schools, shopping centers, and small theaters. She made her solo performance debut at the Hong Kong Cafe

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in L.A. in 1979. Toti O'Brien worked in the circle of “third theater” (the name for noncommercial or avant-garde theater in Europe) between Rome and Paris for half a decade before she emigrated to L.A. She realized here that she had to call her theater works “performances” so that her audience would not have the wrong expectations. John O'Brien and Steve Roden were both trained in visual arts. O'Brien had practiced and then retreated from live art until he joined his life and career with that of an active performer, Toti. Roden had always done sound pieces together with his paintings; he joined the O'Briens as the third movement performer after serving as the sound artist for the couple. As a curious youngster, Naoyuki Oguri was entranced by avant-garde dance and happenings in Japan in the early 1980s; it was an intercultural landscape invigorated by the legendary prankish happenings of Hi Red Center and the underground Butoh mystiques of Tatsumi Hijikata.^[16] Oguri immersed himself in this landscape by training with the dancer/choreographer Min Tanaka's Body Weather Laboratory, in which he worked as a farmer and performed as a dancer. Hesettled in L.A. because in his own country he could not have worked as a full-time artist. Steinberg studied postmodern dance in college and visited Japan to do some choreographic work. She ended up participating in dance workshops with Tanaka. Steinberg sees her collaboration with Oguri as dance rather than as performance art or art performance. Both Sim and Steger participated in the experimental dance and theater scenes in San Francisco; they started developing their own breed of alien body art when they joined forces in 1989 to find an expression that would connect their athletic proclivities with a mutual interest in science, animation, and pop culture.

Multicentricity provides a sharp angle to view the disparate aspirations and diverse biographies of these art performance practitioners. Their live artworks, however, do share some discernible tendencies to justify their adjacent placement in my virtual gallery called “Chapter 7.” These tendencies characterize the aesthetic affinities among my selected artists/ensembles, although they are not necessarily typical of all art performances. The terms I use to describe these aspects—nontext basis, body technology, improvisation-genesis, homixenology, and audience consumption—may sound unfamiliar; the techniques contained in them are by no means revolutionary. In fact, each aspect corresponds to a tentative idea laid out by Artaud's The Theater and Its Double in the 1930s. What is remarkable is the degree to which the four groups take these techniques into their performances, as well as the variety they display.

Nontext Basis. Almost all the performance works produced by the selected groups are movement-based rather than text-based. In appearance, these performances might be broadly recognized as dance theater, although visual design and performance concepts also feature prominently. Music, instead of

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speech, plays the central role in creating the auralscapes in these works. Some of the pieces are performed, however, in silence, with the sounds of breathing, stretching muscles, rotating props, and clashing bodies as the only music. Language is incorporated as sound poetry; spoken words are juggled in the air or spit out from the larynx like fluttering verbal ribbons. Such use of the language, as Artaud describes, “turns words into incantations. It extends the voice. It utilizes the vibrations and qualities of the voice. It wildly tramples rhythms underfoot. It pile-drives sounds.”^[17] The symbolic value of language is displaced—but not destroyed—by the material attributes of the sounds and the physicality of the performing bodies.

Body Technology. But often it's more than the Artaudian “poetry in space” that these movement-centered performances exhibit.^[18] The body gestures of a Went piece are so dominated by a wild abandon that her movement language is more akin to a tornado on stage than poetry in space. Poetry in space is more appropriate as a description for the somatic lyricism issuing from O'Brien, O'Brien, and Roden's movement pieces, but a generous awkwardness at times staggers the performers' motions, turning their poetry in space into three-dimensional nursery rhymes or nonsensical tongue-twisters. Oguri and his collaborating dancers enact both haikus in the void and grotesque scriptures on the earth. The hybrid choreography danced by this intercultural ensemble mixes the exactitude of anatomical physics with evocative poetry in space. Sim and Steger of osseus labyrint have created an astonishing series of kinetic vocabularies that veer between acrobatics and extreme sports, between corporeal animation and a transgressive ballet. Their movements systematize poetry in space with a mathematical rigor so that it becomes a body technology, a science of cyber-mechanics operated by little else than their own flesh.

Improvisation-Genesis. “The theater is the only place in the world,” observes Artaud, “where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice.”^[19] Artaud's claim for the uniqueness of theater art may be grandiloquent, but his remark pinpoints the nonduplicatable quality of gesture. In contrast to a written language, a gesture can scarcely be copied exactly. There is a higher degree of liberty and distortion involved in mimicking a gesture than in transcribing a discursive text; this is so even with the coded sign-language, for any impression—vocal, facial, or gestural—made by the live body is affected by the impermanence of the flesh. In this sense, to create kinetic sculptures in a body-based performance is to be always in the throes of improvisation, no matter how rehearsed the enactment may be. Since the selected art performances all apply certain types of body technology, improvisation both features as a supreme methodology in making and rehearsing the pieces and extends to the performance process as a continuous generative force. When no rehearsals

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are held, as is the case with Went, the process of improvisation becomes the performance itself.

Homi-xenology. To cultivate the technological capacity of the body is to mold or transform the body into hitherto unexpected, unimaginable, even impossible, corporeal forms. A consistent strategy adopted by the four groups to showcase their body technologies is to allow their human actors to merge performatively with the bodies of others —gods, demons, monsters, animals, plants, minerals, insects, bacteria, machines, sign systems, natural elements, extraterrestrial beings. I offer the neologism “homi-xenology” to account for the transitory fusion of two mutually alien forms—the body of the human performer (“homi,” an inflected prefix derived from the Latin homo) absorbing the postures, gaits, proportions, behaviors, and imagined psychic states of other species (“xenology,” from the Greek xenos and suffix “logy”). A freeranging creative method, homi-xenology draws inspiration from the biological, scientific, and fantastic worlds in order to extend the ornamental reach of the performer's body. Such a kinetic merging of the human performer with the body of others resembles what Artaud posits as “totemism,” which is created on “behalf of actors”: “the old totemism of animals, stones, objects capable of discharging thunderbolts, costumes impregnated with bestial essences— everything, in short, that might determine, disclose, and direct the secret forces of the universe.”^[20] Artaud believes that totemism, like brimstone, is a source of constant magic, which will help us rediscover and exercise the vital forces of life. While his belief is esoteric and unverifiable, Artaud's comment serves to analyze the inexplicable sensations that we might experience while witnessing a spectacle of “the marvelous.”^[21] What we marvel at perhaps is the tremendous power of the human imagination that craves for maximum expression, which is indeed a manifestation of vitality.

Audience Consumption. In his Second Manifesto for the Theater of Cruelty, Artaud imagines the production of a spectacle so encompassing spatially that it utilizes the entire hall of the theater, from the floor to the wall to the light-hanging catwalks. The spectators are so assaulted by the constant onslaught of light, images, movements, and noises from all directions that “there will be no respite nor vacancy in [their] mind or sensibility.”^[22] I doubt that Artaud's spatial scheme is the only way to create a vigorous theatrical experience, but his analysis insightfully portrays a spectator's all-consuming involvement (no perceptual vacancy left) with an intense manifestation of theatricality. I find Artaud's manifesto most useful as a description for how a live audience relates to a (theatrical) performance. Although Artaud might well reject my chosen vocabulary, I venture to suggest that this relationship between a theatrical enactment and its immediate receivers is best construed as an act of consumption on the part of the audience—taking “consumption” as

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both an absorption and an expenditure. While these spectators may regard themselves as cultural consumers, the selected art performance practitioners also relate to their spectators as those who consume their spectacles, which are products made as transitory commodities and cultural diets. The spectators may or may not enjoy what the artists offer; they may appreciate, comprehend, feel confused or put off by the spectacle; they may wander off or shut off their attention from time to time, but they are there spending the time watching the performance unfold from its emergence to dissipation. Insomuch as consumption is a digestive act, these spectators are consumers experiencing a transaction: they inject, absorb, or waste the spectacle in exchange for momentary sensory gratification, aesthetic elevation, or mnemonic stimulation. What has transpired in the performative transaction—however interactive it has been—exists nowhere but in the partial remembrance of those who produced and those who consumed the spectacle. Something invariably is lost after the performance, even to its video documentation. That something lost is that which has been consumed entirely during a performative transaction; it mirrors the irrevocability of life itself.