We stumble down some steep steps and through a heavy door to reach the bowels of the Dance Center. My guide to this well-lit, overheated underworld starts gesticulating and talking as soon as we hit the basement floor.
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Grigsby sits on a chair with a dangerously raked seat and says, “It’s quite comfortable really–if you’ve been drinking heavily.” He explains that the set’s schematic windows will have real curtains, which will blow in a gentle breeze, and points out that the coffee table has two drink glasses painted on it. But he claims that the elements don’t add up to an identifiable room. “I think it’s in outer space–not real outer space, but perhaps somewhere here in Chicago.”
Grigsby, a Chicago performance artist, has also written the text for this duet, a text he says is a kind of chronicle: “It’s a little bit like 30 different soap operas–there are 30-some characters and we never get a lot of information about them, we never know where they’re going or how they resolve their dilemmas. But I’m hoping that you begin to get a picture of these people–which is not happy, not good.” Part of the text is three personal ads that sound frighteningly like the real thing.
That calls to Grigsby’s free-ranging mind a much-loved dog, a gentle, well-trained creature who completely changes personality when she has a bone. “You can take it from her, but . . . She’s a different dog. It’s much deeper than she is. I love her for it. You’re talking about centuries of dogness.”
