SLEEPLESS AND WITHOUT NURTURE
A young woman grabbed a prop–a popcorn bucket–and placed it beneath the drips. The two performers carried on without so much as a glance at the water coming down from the ceiling center stage at the Bop Shop. The leak wasn’t part of the performance, but in retrospect it added to a certain atmosphere against which all the performers that night struggled, from botched light and sound cues to laughter overheard from the comedy club in the next room. But the performances were all so interesting it didn’t matter. In fact these occurrences seemed part of a long performance-art tradition: to perform in a spirit of experimentation, against and within the elements of chance and in far-from-ideal surroundings.
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I remember hearing about Ilona Granet’s performance at N.A.M.E. gallery in 1978. She had spoken to the audience about her rape experiences, about the feeling of being preyed upon. She began to play a tape that recreated what various rapists had said to her. Meanwhile she went outside, and immediately a carful of men began harassing her–in full view of the audience, who watched through the picture windows at the old space on Hubbard Street. Just as the men got out of the car, local musician Emilio Cruz stepped out of a cab and walked her back into the gallery. This encounter happened entirely by chance. When Granet returned to the gallery she began to scream at the audience for watching passively and not coming to her rescue. Granet says now that she metamorphosed from a wisp of a woman to a wild woman before their eyes. “My obsession was that I wanted people in the audience to feel like rape victims. Chance drove that point home.”
Jeannie Harithas Scanlan opened the evening with “A Hole Is to Dig.” She walks onstage chomping gum, wearing faded black capri pants and turtleneck, a purple cowboy kerchief tied around her neck, her brown hair piled high on her head. She grins at the audience as she climbs into a huge, freestanding rococo skirt (it looks a little like a child’s drawing of a cake) complete with lace, satin, pearls, and yards and yards of various mysterious fabrics draped and cascading. She calls out “Will someone please help, will someone please help me?” (I later found out she was genuinely stuck and genuinely panicked). No one raised a hand or came onstage, until finally a young man rushed up and helped her into the huge hoop-style skirt. Removing her scarf she reveals snake and butterfly “tattoos” all over her arms and neck. She has tattoos under both eyes, too, but unfortunately they’re so small that even from two rows back they resemble football players’ black smudges.
There was something about the falling water, which continued to come down behind me, and the fact that no one seemed to have solved this snafu that created a general feeling of unease, sympathy, and giddy irreverence in the audience. When mistress of ceremonies Penelope Treat announced that Julie Laffin would be firing a cap gun during her piece, “Dear Neth,” the man sitting next to me whispered, “She will be wearing a cap and firing a real gun . . . ”
