Continuum's Live Art Series - Night 4 (NSFW)

Dean Liscum

By the Fourth night of Continuum's Live Art Series, it was very clear to me that these shows don't have a theme. There is a show. There are artists. Performances happen. Nonetheless, themes emerge if for no other reason than we are pattern recognition machines eager to find rhythm and commonality in even the most random phenomena. In CLAS 4, I found the theme to be physical minimalism, a "muscle dance" if you will, a term which I gleefully and un-apologetically stole from Ms. Y.E. Torres. A majority of the performances seemed to be devoid of narrative drama, but replete with physical tension.

As is my habit, I was running a little late and I literally stepped into the evening's opening performance, In Remembrance of Me by Joshua Yates. He was quietly kneeling in the center of six concentric circles of broken (one could say disassembled) cinder blocks. He continued to meditate\pray while I jockeyed for a position upstairs at Avant Garden.

Without saying a word, Yates picked up a cinder block. He held it close to his face, close enough to smell, close enough to kiss and mouth words to it. Perhaps blessing. Perhaps cursing. Perhaps comforting. Perhaps scolding. Then he placed the fragment in a white nylon bag, re-positioned his body every so slightly in a counter-clockwise direction to toward the next fragment. Repeated the ritual. He performed the same process for each rock in the circle.

 
Joshua Yates amid the 6 rings of disassembled cinder blocks


Sniff? Lick? Kiss? Bless?
 
Once he'd gathered all the rocks in the circle into the bag, he stood up, twisted the top of the bag closed, and then thrust it over his head. He held it for 15 may be 20 seconds.





Then he knelt in the center of the circle and repeated the process. With each circle, the fragments increased in size and the bag grew substantially heavier. At first, what was trivial--the hoisting of the bag and holding it up to the light--became non-trivial, became challenging.





A feat of effortless ritual became a feat of physical strength and endurance. The offering was uncertain. The tension was palpable. Would he lift it? Drop it? Fall? Collapse.


Holding 5 rings of cinder block overhead


Attempting to hoist all 6 rings of cinder block 

After the final circle of fragments had been gathered and the bag was secured closed, Yates struggled to lift the bundle.



Sweat beaded on his face. He breathed deeply, heavily, grunted, dropped the bag heavily. A small cloud of cinder block dust exploded from the bag. Redoubling his effort, he crouched deeper, struggled vigorously, and dropped it again. He tried a few more times, failing each time and then walked off leaving the bag in the middle of the stage.


The end of Remembrance of Me 

At the conclusion of Yates piece, we filed past the bag of cinder blocks and up the stair to the attic to observe Manola Maldonado's performance, Tea Party. In the darkened attic, Maldonado stood dressed in a frilly short dress holding a green ball over head with unwound magnetic tape attached to her and still connected to their cassettes. She lowered the ball and walked in a small circle dragging the tapes behind her. Then she sat on a blanket among strawberry short cakes, tea, and dolls. La-la singing, she goes through the motions of hosting a tea party and then she dumps powdered sugar over everything.


Manola being mother at tea time 

The dim lighting, the cramped setting, the props, the costuming gave the piece a hallucinatory Alice-and-Wonderland feel, which was obviously intentional. Where the piece lost me was in the connections among the magnetic tape beginning, the tea party middle, and the powdered sugar end.


powdered sugar makes everything better 

My small mind was unable to connect them in any other way than slightly surreal blend. And may be that's as far as I was supposed to.

Into the light and back to the second floor, we went. Jade performed Questions of a Victim. It began with her crouched on the floor in the manner of a child, writing. After a minute or two of intense scribbling, she approached the audience and asked, "Why are they so mean?" Not indicating who they were and thus leaving us to ponder if we were "they" or she was they or they were "they" as we all self-righteously suspected of everyone else but of course we.

She then put on a black shirt and approached the audience again. "Why won't they leave me alone? Shut up!"


Jade 

Next she donned a white shirt and started singing quietly John Lennon's "Imagine". "Imagine all the people..." and then wordlessly hummed the melody.


Jade donning a white shirt, transforming into OK 

Until she stopped and then half-shouted, "Don't let anyone bring you down. Look at me, I turned out OK." Finally, she laughed in a manner that indicated that her character was anything but OK. But, we already knew that and turned away as was expected.

Next up was Jonatan Lopezperforming My Filthy Self. Dressed in sunglass, a white t-shirt, and jeans, he started out strutting down the middle of the room (think Tom Cruise in Risky Business) on an improvised paper runway.


Shame Swagger or Shame Strut? 


kneeling...but not in prayer 

At the end of the runway were two jars of paint: one with red paint and one with black. He knelt between the jars, removed his sunglasses and t-shirt, neatly placed them on the paper, and painted his mouth black.



Next, Lopez removed his pants and lay them out to form a silhouette of a body.



Then he took the black paint brush and began to paint his genitals: black dick, black ball sack.



Once you paint it black... Lopez took his time. Meticulous and thorough, he obviously wanted to give the audience time to observe and reflect.



Black dicked and black balled (I can't help of thinking of Al Jolson...Jade's performance in CLAS 2), he then grabbed the jar of red paint and attempted to pour it on his ass. I'm assuming he was aiming for his asshole (and all the weighted metaphors that it carries).



Lopez then proceeded to pour the red paint on the clothing silhouette at the crotch and near the heart and neck.



Once he'd stained red himself and the clothing to his satisfaction, he picked up a sign board that read "Take my picture" and hung it from his neck with a cord. The board had a hole at crotch level and he stuck his black dick and balls through the hole.



Finally, he circumnavigated the room so that anyone wanting to photograph his filthy self could.
I'm not a psychologist or a psychotherapist, but I don't think that you needed to be to understand this piece. At least symbolically for this performance, it was safe to assume that Black = bad, Red = Blood (and not in a good way), genitalia = self. Lopez showed his shame, so to speak, and the act played our as cathartic for the artist but it was not transferable, at least not for me. His shame was not my shame. (And I've got plenty of shame.) The piece didn't draw me into it to share in his shame or its absolution. It simply showed it to me and gave me and the rest of the audience the opportunity to Instagram it.

As if on cue, Jana Whatley appeared in a black top and black tights and performed Steps through the remnants of Lopez's performance. It consisted of her walking backward in progression of two steps backward, one step forward. It was subtle, quiet, consistent, almost comic in its physical simplicity. In contrast to Lopez's performance, the minimalism served as a palette cleanser.



Whatley walked the second floor, two step backwards and one step forward, and then proceeded downstairs past Koomah performing his durational piece, Waiting. Koomah stood in a full length sleeveless black dress and black veil. Noiseless and still. Audience members late to the show walked past him one by one with the same apprehension that you have in a haunted house, anticipating something and yet not knowing exactly what or when. Their individual but similar reactions amusingly hypnotized me.


Koomah Waiting 

"Hello?..." David Collins voice broke Koomah's spell. He stumbled into the performance space wearing bubble wrap and a grimace and nothing else. Then fell to the floor and began rolling around, possibly flailing, but it's hard to flail freely when encased in bubble wrap. His hand, holding a cell phone, was wrapped to his ear. As he continued to talk to the phone, it became clear that he had called a suicide prevention/crisis hotline.


It's a bird, it's a plane...


It's David Collins in the latest in bubble wrap fashion

Through a humorous monologue we learned that his character

• is 50
• is depressed
• is incompetent at suicide (plenty of kerosene but no match)
• quit his lucrative job (would rather die than work for Chevron)
• is depressed by his mortality and it's possibly killing him
• is currently doing a performance art piece
• is indignant that his councilor is in Bangalore and that his existential crisis has been outsourced lives in a commune, and
• concludes that he should talk to people and may be they could help (as opposed to a call center worker who would probably prefer to diagnose his printer error but didn't make a high enough score on that test to work for that company).

Then Collins took his own advice and he talked to the crowd asking them to strip him naked and pop the bubbles.


Note to self: dress in bubble wrap if you want beautiful people to strip you naked. 

And they did. I'm not sure they found meaning in the act, but they got to bare skin.

Once Collins had been stripped and all his bubbles popped, Koomah placed a chair in the middle of the room and Jonatan Lopez sat in it. In this piece called Transference, Lopez sat and thought of a painful memory. Hopefully, it was the one that inspired him to paint his dick black in My Filthy Self because I don't think he's done working through that stuff. Koomah then knelt behind Lopez for about a minute. Then Koomah moved in front of Lopez, reached out and touched his face.


Here, my inner pentacostal minister was saying, "Give me your shame brother Jonatan" 

With his eyes closed, Koomah then tilted his face towards Lopez's and breathed deeply until he suddenly let go and walked away.


And here I felt like yelling "Out demon! Out!" 

As you might have gathered from my photo captions, I understood the concept but I didn't feel it. To be fair to Koomah, I've been to waaaaayyyyy too many charismatic church services (I call them "freak out for Jesus" sessions) for this subtle form of transference to have an effect on me. I also don't know if it worked for Lopez or even if it was supposed to or what that would have looked like. The audience, however, seemed accepting of the ambiguity.

Jonatan moved himself and the chair out of the performance area and then Sway Youngston unceremoniously dumped three bags of leaves on the floor. She did it with impunity and she could because they were locally sourced from the Montrose, the Heights, and a communal living space entitled Urth House.


Sway laying down the leaves 

She then cleared a circular space in the middle of the pile and began her piece entitled, What's Left? She then arranged on the floor a bunch of clay spirit animals that audience members had been invited to make when they entered the bar.


Clearing a space 

She plucked one up and asked "Whose spirit animal is this?" A man claimed it and she asked him to come into the circle. She lay on her back, placed a 2' x 2' plywood square on her torso, placed the spirit animal on the square, and instructed him to smash his spirit animal with a plastic hammer. He did. First with a tentative swing, then with a more forceful one.


Caution: Spirit animal slayer at work 

Youngston repeated this process with several more spirit animals and their creators until there was a sizable lump of clay on the board.


Spirit crushing spans genders. 

Then she gathered the clay from the board on stomach, and molded it to her face until it was completely covered. Breathing heavily, she searched for the hammer with her hands. After she found it, she struck her belly, hard. Once. Twice. Five times.


Sway covered in spirit animal remains 

Next, she took the handle of the hammer and inserted it into her mouth. (I'm hesitant to use a religious or politically biased description here, but if I use a pornographic one, # 1. One will comment about it and # 2. Everyone will know exactly what I'm talking about.) Basically, she deep-throated the hammer handle and held it there for half a minute or a full minute. Finally, she turned to the side and spit it out.


Sway swallowing the spirit animal slayer 

What's left but to interpret the piece as one about spirit crushing. And not the corporate/geo-political/material world (a favorite scapegoat in a culture that simultaneously insists on personal autonomy) crushing our spirit, but we (I'll join the audience for this one) volunteering to and then gleefully or at least willingly crushing our own spirits. At the end, I was uneasy with the piece but not sure why. Was it a little too easy or a little too close to home?

At that point, it was intermission and with all the shame and spirit crushing that I'd endured, I needed a drink to lift my spirits. I headed down to the bar and almost walked into the arms of Shanon Adams performing one of the durational pieces. I'll christen it Ballet d' Ugs, because I lack imagination and she was wearing Ug boots as she proceeded to dance through out the bar.


Ninja? No. Shanon Adams

Adams moved through the bar gracefully. Her movements were deliberate, hinting at an overall choreography.



Nevertheless, she flowed around drunk patrons and unbalanced art reviewers with too much equipment as if our movements had been anticipated and incorporated into the piece.



Third, she choreographs her pieces to non-traditional belly dancing music.



In Muscle Dance, the soundtrack consisted of mouth noises, electronic pops, synthetic minimalism. Her movements were equally slow, graceful, and intentional.





Like all dance-centric performances, it's just something you have to experience. (Unfortunately, I can't find a video of it I can share.)

Shifting from non-verbal, elegiac to the prosaic, Julia Claire Wallace took the stage and announced that she wanted a revolution. She signaled to the audience to gather around her in her kindly, unassuming Mr. Roger's style. We flocked around her like obedient school children. "I want a revolution." She declared and they echoed. "Say it like you mean it." They repeated it louder because bigger is better and louder passes for conviction. (This is Texas after all). A woman, Kira, began to drum on a table. Lead by Wallace, we chanted/sang "I want change." The performance morphed into a spontaneous revolution song that built and then ended. Was that it? Was that revolutionary to you? Apparently, in Ms. Wallace's neighborhood it was.


Julie Claire Wallace, the "Mr. Rogers" of Houston performance art 

Wallace again...I meant to photograph the drummer, but revolutions are not conducive to photography.

In the final act of the evening, Jajah Graytook the floor and made a makeshift alter. It consisted of cards, books, three glasses of water, cloths (scarfs/shawls/do rags/bandannas).


Jajah making an altar 

He asked the audience "Can you imagine a world so clean and pure?" He then emptied his pockets of money. Coins spilled on to the floor, bounced, rolled. Gray stomped a beat with his feet. The audience picked it up.



Gray performed and held a yoga bridge until I thought he'd collapse. Instead, he began dancing and vaulting over the altar. After a few passes, he partially deconstructed the altar and offered parts to the audience while singing query, "Can you imagine a world so clean and pure?" The audience joined in. A dog, that had been silently present for all the performances, suddenly barked. Gray started the crowd foot stomping and then began singing, in what I don't think was English. (But it was late, I'd had a few drinks, and had been nailed, so I'm not testifying to any of this.)



Gray drank from 1 of the 3 glasses of water, shouted, and then the performance ended.


Jajah ends 

 To me, Grays performances, similar to Y.E. Torres, are lyrical and mystical. The intention was not always clear and segments didn't always cohere but there was the physicality of them and the oblique content created ample space for me to get comfortable in them.

The evening of performances over, I headed downstairs in to Julia Claire Wallace durational performance Dirt Massage.


Julie Claire Wallace in Dirt Massage
 
After standing for 4+ hours, I could have used a massage. Nevertheless, she wasn't giving she was receiving. The handwritten sign by her side read, "I truly need a massage."



Hilary Scullane fulfilling wishes Wallace provided the dirt and the massage oil. The audience was expected to provide the labor. A couple of Continuum members applied oil liberally and pressed and pushed the dirt into Wallace's back, shoulders, arms, legs.



I took a turn making mud pies on Wallace's back and then kneading, rubbing, and pressing it into her flesh.



Relaxing for her. Raw, minimal, perhaps even infantile for us. And yet, satisfying in the way that the most successful performances of the evening were. Minimal and primal and direct.