Where Are My Forest Brothers & Sister?

Last night I dreamed they were coming to L.A. so that we could do our Forest Bros performance again. After we got off stage they disappeared and I wandered around calling out “Liudni slibinai!” but I couldn’t find them. In the dream, I spoke to a philanthropist about sponsoring them: I made a case for them as political refugees who needed to come to the U.S. to escape persecution. Lithuania’s law against “promotion of homosexual relations in public places” implicates unspecified forms of expression, making camp theatricality criminal. Occupation by the Soviet Union and Nazis (and Polish…) has created a society of un-ironic conformism. But Liudni slibinai are not in any danger, as far as I can tell. They are happy college students. The dream was a rewrite of what happened: we worked together intensely for ten days, bonded in rehearsal, watched them perform in a class play at their school, shot a video in a KGB prison cell and in the forest full of moss and mushrooms, shared the stage, began a friendship, and then, after a meal of jellied pork and Three Nines brandy, it was over. I miss Vaidas, Aiste and Dominykas. Somehow, we must meet again, even if I can’t rescue / capture them. For now, I will just remember this mournful tune, about belonging and not belonging, that we wrote for them, and that we all sang together.

Mask Work I

Kantor in The Night Epi$ode, a My Barbarian production.

This is Kantor.  She is a copywriter.  She is one of only three women at her agency.*  A single mother, Kantor grew up in Pasadena.   She now owns a house in Sherman Oaks and rents foreign movies every other night. She sees herself as a character in an Almódovar film: a divorced woman of character, characterized by a red dress, complicated by passions suppressed by work, family, geography, economics and the world, but who will, someday, release her inner life in a colorful sequence of events.

Kantor also sees herself as a wry wit, and plans to someday write an essay proving this to be true.  She is known for acidic zingers at the office.  She suspects this is a double-edged sword.  The execs are suspicious of her, she suspects. That said, she recently got a raise, despite the regrettable joke she made at the expense of the art director, (which got laughs from the interns and one guy in corporate communications).

Kantor hates her kids.  They have proven a disappointment.  She thinks they will die in drunk-driving accidents.  She wants to spare herself the grief associated with losing a child, so she is deliberately alienating herself from them.  When she ID’s the bodies, she will be prepared. She has mourned already.  When her children die, she will write the essay, she will have her close-up, she will….

"Cheers to me."

* Bissell, Bissell & Mortimer.  The other two women are Seagram, in graphic design, and Cynthia, a book-keeper who is always almost fired.  Seagram and Kantor ate Mr. Bissell, the eldest of the two Bissell’s, for dinner, one night.

Broke Baroque II

My Barbarian, Broke People's Baroque Peoples' Theater, video still, 2009

B’ROQUE

Artistic innovation patronized by royal advisors
Wasteful spending in a time of distraction and wars
Gods of Play! Artificial dolphins
Spitting plumes of Aqua in fake island fountains
Infrastructure crumbles as the pleasure palace rises
Admirers encounter all the nobles’ clothes
In Rome, Il Castrati sing the great sopranos
In Madrid, las Majas play the tragic heroes
A succession of monarchs and economic disasters
Taxation on workers but not their masters
Violence!
The view from above is the best seat in the house
Such a different time, I’m just saying
From 1580 to 1680 roughly
The Baroque broke out in a rash of Golden Ages
From Italy to France to Austria to Holland to Spain
Also, Vilnius, Lithuania
Catholicism rebranded
In a flurry of curly golden scrambled eggs
Which are inedible
Such a different time, I’m just saying

Libretto by Alexandro Segade.
Music composed by Malik Julian Gaines.

Captive Within

Another old video, from the mid-zeroes. I played the Mad Monk and Karen Hallock played the Czarina.  It is an improvised intrigue.

Transparency I

The invisible can’t be seen; the transparent can be seen through. One disappears; the other reveals.

The Fourth Wall is the invisible curtain that remains when the cloth is drawn, the imagined architecture separating audience from performance, and without it, everyone is implicated in the action. The use of asides in Shakespeare and direct address in Brecht are models for looking the public in the eye, admitting the presence in the room, transgressing a boundary put in place by collective will. Perhaps this veil is an insoluble membrane enclosing every move. Or, in the absence of a stage, space is the place in which one performs.

Transparency commonly serves as a metaphor for the openness of operations of an organization to public scrutiny. In the 2005 text entitled ‘There is No Alternative: The Future is Self-Organised,” the writers describe a political interpretation of the term:

“By transparency we mean an opening up of the administrative and financial functions/decision making processes to public scrutiny. By accountability we mean that these functions and processes are clearly presented, monitored and that they can in turn, be measured and contested by participants at any time. Equality and open participation is exactly what is says – that men and women of all nationalities, race, colour and social status can participate in any of these processes at any time.” 1

Transparency is trans-identity, crossing over and among solid structures using light to make evident the space between molecules, and in so doing, revealing the navigable interstices between fixed points.

Transparency lets the light in. What is behind an object may be seen, and what is most satisfying to the eye is apprehending the passage of light: a glowing, distorted journey, and so, the wonder of glass. Glass is used to frame photos and drawings. Glass is used in a vitrine. It protects so much art. It pretends to be invisible, but can blind when the light shines on it. Windows are transparent, hidden by curtains, blinds. Stained glass windows, Medieval ones, pre-Raphaelite and Art Nouveau knock-offs, jewel tones, artifice, church, boudoir. The illusion of transparency is common to painting, which is concerned with light, up to a point that tapers off when Impressionism goes Post-, only to rise up again freakishly in photorealism. In Modernism, I think of Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, whose watery paintings allowed the canvas to be seen, an argument for medium specificity, used against theater, which is always a combination of media. Distortion distorting, values darkening the light, I think of Dan Graham. I think of Diana Thater, reminding me of MOCA: those colored stickers she made for the doors of the Geffen Contemporary color light. And so the body of the viewer is mutely engaged, reflective, reflecting on vision, silently, breaking only the subtlest of laws. In theater, I think of gels and filters, used to color the light that sets the scene. In theater, one thinks not of paintings but of scrims, ubiquitous, lit from one angle to appear opaque, the other to be see-through. Back to stained glass windows, I think of Chagall’s windows at the UN. They are Modernity, their placement in the international political body as obfuscating as any mural, yet allowed to be lit up by the sun, reiterating the rhetoric of a temple. Transparency is ideological, even when phenomenological.

Project Notes for My Barbarian’s ”The Fourth Wall”

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1 Dillemuth, Stephan, Davies, Anthony, Jakobsen, Jakob, “There is No Alternative: The Future is Self-Organised,’ Copenhagan, 2005, reprinted in Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader published by the Tate.

Lithuania / Lothlorien

I went to Lithuania twice in 2009.  Both times I stayed in Vilnius, a city that once was Polish, other times under Nazi German occupation or Communist Russian control.  In the 14th Century, the Lithuanian empire stretched across the continent, from the Baltic to the Adriatic.   It was the last pagan state in Europe.   JRR Tolkien based Elvish on Lithuanian, a language said to most closely resemble the original Indo-European.   It is not a Slavic language.

Lithuania is in a post-Soviet state of mind, a Baltic hangover from almost twenty years of madcap capitalism.  Vilnius is a recently repainted Baroque city, fancy stores and and thrift stores mixed together among cave-like alleys and cobbled-together streets.  Vilnius is also all about modern Eastern Bloc blocky cement monoliths with low ceilings and small windows.  From the refurbished Panorama Hotel, trendy light fixtures stuck onto oppressive Soviet-style concrete walls, you can see the fairytale skyline, formed of green minarets and pink cathedral domes and castle walls and mist and trees.  That is the view from the glass wall of the lobby.  From my room, I saw the train station, the McDonald’s, twelve year-olds smoking in the parking lot, black-haired prostitutes teetering on stiletto-heeled boots as they walked through the drive-thru, taxi drivers listening to techno.

A vision of an iron-clad wolf is the well-worn image central to the myth of Vilnius: King Gediminas dreamed of its message to build a castle on a hill, forming the symbolic origin of the city.  I often saw packs of men in leather jackets, buzz cut, stalking the streets shoulder to shoulder, their tight jeans decorating their tank-like asses with brass-studded pockets in Italianate curls.  The iron wolf patches worn by the Lithuanian partisans during the post-War period have been replaced by knock-offs of Dolce & Gabanna.  There is an intimidating smell of cologne and aftershave hovering over these sons of Gediminas, a fear-inducing gas cloud that surrounds the passerby with a dreadful warning, forcing people to move along quickly.

When a friend of mine was attacked by three guys one night, I could picture the whole thing exactly.  When I heard he had been refused help from the police, I could picture that too.  I was reminded of the banged up little black and white car, a young policeman in his black cap crouched close to the wheel, who sped up as we bolted through the cross walk late one night.  A Lithuanian woman told us that you are supposed to keep cash in your car to pay them off.  In any case, they left my friend to the wolves.

Peasants of Mind

A 2003 super 8 film of the improvised modern dance in the apartment one afternoon genre.

Broke Baroque I

When My Barbarian was asked by Emily Roysdon to propose a new work for the group show Ecstatic Resistance (opening Nov 21 at Grand Arts), Jade Gordon and I decided we would like to make a scale model of a Baroque theater (like the one we saw in a museum in Vilnius) to create a theatrical frame for showing video of live performance. Grand Arts, located in Kansas City, Missouri, is known for its fabrication house, which generously offers to make whatever an artist dreams up, as long as it’s within the budget. This is good, because I can’t build anything. I spent a week in Kansas City, staying at Grand Arts, where I made this illustration for them (along with a detailed template) so they can build The Broke People’s Baroque Peoples’ Theater.

Illustration by A. Segade

Death in the Boyzone

The death of Irish boy-bander Stephen Gately was sad and strange. He was 33, he was in his home in Majorca, he was on the couch. His body was found, on the couch, by a house guest who is described in the press as a “Bulgarian clubber” named Georgi. Gately died of natural causes, a pulmonary oedema, according to the Spanish coroner. He is survived by his husband Andrew Cowles, who was also in the house at the time of his death.

It is possible that Stephen Gately died of contentedness. He was at his bay view home, with the man he loved and someone they had picked up at a club. Maybe he was buzzing from a night of champagne and cocaine. Maybe he was tired because he was sober and had used all his energy on the dance floor. He was probably nervously anticipating the three-way that had been orchestrated by his husband. Maybe it wasn’t a big deal, and he planned to sit this one out, letting Andrew have some fun while he reclined on the couch and stared at the water. He felt like he was drowning in the miraculous life he’d lead: from teenaged dancer to pop star to national hero and married man, he looked better than ever and would never have to worry about money. He was adored. Even if critical acclaim had never found him, he had achieved notoriety because he was brave. He had announced to the world who he was, and they accepted that with applause, even in his Catholic family, even in his home of Ireland. He felt like he was drowning in tears of gratitude for such a life. Then he felt nothing.

Andrew, suddenly feeling guilty in the bathroom with Georgi, sent the naked 25-year old to the living room to see if Stephen wanted to join them, or if he was in a mood, or if he was asleep, which he at first appeared to be. I feel so sad for Andrew, imagining the complex and ornate guilt he must be feeling. If he had known, if only he could have imagined, he would never have left Stephen’s side. But he wasn’t there, he was with some trick, and he would never see Stephen singing and dancing, in real life, again. By all accounts, Andrew Cowles tried to revive Stephen Gately, again and again. He would be tormented by all the ghosts of Stephen, from embodied memories to digital video clips, for the rest of his life.

Gately’s first appearance with Boyzone, “the Irish answer to Take That,” reveals an elfin youth with an open shirt voguing and vamping in front of an uncoordinated wall of muscle, his serenely wry smile framed by elastic arms and percussive knees, like a portait of a cherubic leprechaun in an animated baroque frame. For those of us who did not grow up in Ireland in the 90’s, (even those of us who do take boy bands very seriously) Boyzone’s significance may be hard to identify. But Gately’s coming out in 1999 and his 2003 marriage to Andrew Cowles placed him in the small and delicate constellation of openly gay performers in the entertainment industry. The “boy band,” by its very nature, is gay, and Boyzone was the band that admitted this first.

The story of Stephen Gately and Andrew Cowles appears to me to be the kind of tragedy we should celebrate, like any great romance. Their story has reignited my belief that gay marriage could be wonderful and unique, like a rare orchid.

Some links:
Boyzone live, performing “No Matter What.”
Boyzone’s adult contemporary, gay-friendly video.
Gately’s solo ballad about his solo career.

Replicants vs Separatists

The second part of a project considering the rhetorical, legal, political and personal ramifications of same-sex marriage in the aftermath of Prop 8, Time & Love II: Replicants vs Separatists stages a speculative battle between competing factions across the post-apocalyptic landscape of California as a failed state. Science fiction, satire and memoir inform the shifting registers of the performance, as Segade projects hand drawn animation onto live performance as a means of navigating conflicting positions of integration, rebellion, normativity and radicality. In the fractured narrative voice shared by four actors, pop cultural events elide into lived experience. The troupe enacts a humble marriage ceremony at the East LA County Clerk’s Office, the recent death of Irish pop star Stephen Gately of Boyzone, Lesbian baby showers, the life of Golan Cipel (the Israeli man whose relationship with Jim McGreevey ended his governorship of New Jersey), protesting Prop 8 in the shadow of Obama’s election, online speculations about the sexuality of the actor who plays Spock in the new Star Trek franchise, paying (or not paying) state taxes (as a couple), and Schwarzenegger’s dual role as Terminator of the State of California and (secretly) officiator at the wedding of two men on his staff. Borrowing from the language of Hollywood movies (Bladerunner, Alien vs Predator, X-Men, etc.), Segade’s mythic war between android replicants and mutant separatists provides a spectacular motif for this violently ambivalent consideration of the ways in which the law fails to provide an equitable structure for the governance of human life.

Alexandro Segade, Time & Love, Wight Gallery, UCLA, 2009