Photo: Jeanne Randolph
I walked up Albert Street on my way to aceartinc, site of the first day of Performance and Activism in Everyday Life, led by Cheryl L'Hirondelle, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, a two-day workshop expanding ideas of performance art practice in relation to collaboration, community, and activism. As I entered the workshop room I was disappointed that Lorri Millan immediately recognized me. My disguise as Clark Kent was inadequate. Clark Kent didn’t wear cowboy boots.
The rooms where the performance acolytes were working were as quiet as a nunnery. Had the acolytes taken a vow of silence? “They are at the consideration, contemplation and systematic design phase,” Lorri advised, “Earlier they were moving.”
The most prominent sound was that of ballpoint pens on paper. The occasional creak of a chair. Footsteps, possibly from the floor above or another room.
Having remembered always the Fassbinder movie, Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven, I took the cap off the lens of a huge protruding Nikon camera I had borrowed for journalistic effect. My camera flashbulb would startle the acolytes as they sprawled unselfconsciously on green and red mats. Their concentration would be interrupted, their annoyed faces would shine full moon white in the artificial glare. Yes, the blogger’s calling is to ruin lives, just like in the movie.
Fluttering paper pinned to the wall distracted me, however. The invisible blogger devised another unethical move: to rob the acolytes of the pinned papers, which were likely documents of their aesthetic activist intentions, to be enacted in the streets tomorrow.
I simply walked to the wall and removed the two sheets of newsprint, careful lest their crinkling alert someone. Either I was marvelously adept or nobody cared. I left the room easily. In the downstairs foyer I unfolded the papers and eagerly read the secrets I had purloined:
CONCEPTUAL, LOCATION-BASED, SITE DRIVEN, EXPRESSIVE,
A LANGUAGE, INTERACTIVE, HISTORY, TIME-BASED, MOVEMENT,
BODY, PUBLIC, DISRUPTIVE, HUMOUROUS, UNCOMFORTABLE,EMPHEMERAL…
And to think I had once claimed that performance art is “Anything set in motion by someone who cares.” This group was looking closer, way closer.
Before I stepped onto McDermot Street again I looked back at a light switch at the door to aceartinc’s darkened stairway. Tomorrow the switch will be in the ON position.
- Jeanne Randolph, (in)visible cities Rapporteur/Blogger
(Photo, left: Jeanne Randolph)
Workshop photos by Scott Stephens:
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