PERFORMANCE CHICAGO
Debora Duez Donato, originator of “Performance Chicago,” needs to raise the standards for these works. Both pieces presented on the second weekend–Joanna Frueh’s Mouth Piece and Heidi A. Lang’s Breaking It–seemed thin, unfinished, and flat, giving complicated problems simplistic solutions.
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Mouth Piece, according to program notes, “focuses on the importance of individuals speaking for themselves, the significance of learning and using one’s own voice in terms of personal and social empowerment and the necessity of being one’s own mouthpiece.” Frueh spends about an hour reading a collection of lyrical texts, her own and others’, that present images of women’s powerlessness, of misogyny, and of sexual obsession. She begins standing at a microphone, where she reads snippets, sometimes in a stream-of-consciousness style, that reveal layers of hidden meaning and forgotten associations in everyday language. The verb “sing,” for example, is from the Gaelic meaning “explain.” Every few minutes she moves to a chair a few steps away to read a monologue addressed to an unseen man with whom she appears to carry on an addictive, destructive sexual relation.
Only the image of forced silence, briefly examined, offers a moment of insight. Frueh touches on it early in the piece in a story about “Everett Everhart.” Everhart is a voice teacher who wants Frueh to be a chanteuse, and demands a certain kind of vocal placement from her. This is the perfect image for a tacit gag order: the man would have the woman be a chanteuse, an “explainer,” yet will force her instrument to duplicate his own ideal. This episode, which is marvelously illuminating and full of powerful associations, is not further developed.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Huntley Barad.
