From the mid-1960's on, Jack Smith—best-known as the director of Flaming Creatures (1962-63), a key work In the American avant-garde film—has astonished New York audiences with a series of highly influential performance pieces. Although Smith's theatre, which is even more fugitive and underground than his film production, has attracted little critical writing, it has made itself felt in the work of artists as otherwise disparate as Ronald Tavel, John Vaccaro, Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson. At the same time, Smith's refusal to separate his persona from his art presaged the gallery-based “performance artists” of the mid-1970's. His presentations include the ongoing slide-show (known variously as Spiritual Oasis of Lucky Landlord Paradise, Fear Ritual of Shark Museum, Horror of the Rented World), which has in some ways superceded his 16mm film work, and a number of individual plays. Both modes are original and important contributions to American art.

Sakonnet Point, Rumstick Road, and Nayatt School were first presented by the Performance Group at the Performing Garage in New York City in the spring of 1975, 1977, and 1978 respectively. They opened again as a trilogy of theatre pieces in December of 1978 under the collective title of Three Places in Rhode Island. Each production came about as a result of concentrated preparations that were begun the fall prior to their opening, and they demonstrate a final result that only a generous amount of time and effort could have produced. The process involved not only Spalding Gray and Elizabeth Le Compte, the chief collaborators, but also Ron Vawter, Libby Howes, Bruce Porter, Bruce Rayvid, Gabrielle Lansner, and a variety of other participants. In form and style, the pieces differ widely, but all three concentrate on a single subject: the development of a character named Spalding Gray as a person and as an artist.

My first moment of theatre, the moment most powerful for me and my first step away from life in the direction of art, occurred in 1961 the first time I was in front of an audience. The play was The Curious Savage. (Ironically enough, it was a romantic play about an insane asylum and its inmates of which I was one.) It was our senior play at a small boarding school I was attending in Maine.

Since 1973 the California artist Linda Montano has used her own life—past and present—as material for her performances. After her estranged husband died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in August 1977, her work focused on reactions to his death.

Some of her earlier performances consisted of her usual activities being observed by others, in 1973, when she lived in San Francisco, she sent announcements to her friends saying that she would stay home for a week and would be available. She photographed everyone who visited during the week and documented food intake, telephone calls, and dreams. In other events she lived-in at several galleries and on the beach for three days at a time. In one of these events, she was blindfolded; in another she listened to her heart murmur with a stethescope. These living events are “framed“ for the viewer by being removed from their usual context.

Gianni Colosimo is the founder and sole member of the Teatro Ludico Libidinale (Ludicrous Libidinal Theatre). His performance, the title of which means “Freud, My Friend,” announces a personal poetics in autoperformance. Colosimo does individually what others in the so-called Post Avant-Garde (T77) do collectively; that is, he plays with “symptoms” of his own pathology and puts them together in a sort of “kinetic” analysis. He tries to materialize the process of “forming” his unconscious, according to Freudian schemes of assimilation. Colosimo identifies himself with the Oedipus character, but the onstage “analysis” is more a cruel ceremony (as in Artaud) than the kind of analytical cruelty that has come to be identified with the Post Avant-Garde and Body artists. The myth is, for him, more important than the materials.

Psychologically, the solo can be seen as the quintessential form of performance. The audience's relationship to the soloist is undivided, gratifying the performer's deepest desires not only to be seen but to be the center of attention. The solo is a means of presenting the self to others, generally in terms of a display of virtuosity designed to elicit the spectator's admiration and awe. Traditionally, the personal, psychological significance of the solo form remains unacknowledged in the performance, shielded, so to speak, by the display of virtuosity. But in the work of Jack Smith, Stuart Sherman and others, the submerged motives of the solo become apparent because it is the play of private obsessions that commands the audience's attention. Amy Taubin's solos are less personal than Smith's or Sherman's. But they are also concerned with emphasizing the solo as a representation of the self.

Ermione, the title of my play, was also the name of the monkey who performed with me in it. It was originally the name of a mythical character, the daughter of Helen and Menelaos; more recently, It was used by Gabriele D'Annunzio in his poem “The Rain in the Pine Forest.” In my play, the monkey corresponded to D'Annunzio's “nymph with the sylvan face” who accompanied him through the metaphorical wood of life.

The text of Ermione was comprised of poetry that I had written from the age of sixteen to thirty; the action consisted of experimenting with ideas for a eventual reading of it. The first thing I wanted to test was the actual selection of verses. I read from a notebook, then provided a running commentary in order to create a distance between the time when the poems were written and the time when they were read. By so doing, I was able, at the same time, to minimize this distance by connecting the old poems to a “live” situation, thus making the link between poetry and life explicit. Next, I wanted to test the actions—the theatrical renderings of the poetry that corresponded to the different stages of life.

For the past two and a half years I have been writing, staging and performing in my own work. Most of these performances have taken place in galleries and museums. Before I began doing my own performances, I worked for short periods of time with different theatre artists in New York. Because I considered myself primarily a performer rather than a writer or director, my first performance began with an idea for a particular character. After making the costume and collecting a few props, I went into the space dressed as the character and improvised different actions. I had a vague idea of possible situations beforehand, but I did not write a scenario or make any notes in advance. Although I wrote a small amount of text as I went along, the final performance was based primarily on the improvisations I did during rehearsals. The performance was a vehicle for the character and a vehicle for me as the performer.

At one time, Stuart Sherman was writing a great deal. To begin the process, he would open a book, choose a word and write. The initial word might be eliminated eventually, no longer needed, but the accumulated associations would have provided ample material for a story. He felt the use of a visual stimulus prevented preconceived notions about the work from hindering the flow of Ideas. In those days, he was also making abstract line drawings, word pictures, of everyday objects: a tree, sunlight, a waterfall. However, the two-dimensionality of the drawings and the writing began to give him the sense of increasing alienation from “animate” things. As a result, he now performs pieces that he considers visual abstract language about the relations between objects; he calls the work “Spectacles.”

The performances usually begin for us in setting up the space on the previous night. The process is similar each time. We both approach it as a kind of ritual.

Winston Tong's solo theatre works—he has created more than half a dozen—meld widely divergent forms and sensibilities: his extreme economy of means is akin to types of traditional Chinese theatre; his use of puppets, dolls, and silhouettes recalls elements of Japanese Bunraku and Javanese shadow puppets; and his startling, pervasive eroticism has roots in nineteenth century French Symbolism.

“A Rimbaud,” which dates from 1976, Is a phantasmagory of tortured sensuality. It came, Tong says, “out of terrible alienation and a desire to make connection with some more ethereal thing. I wondered what love was. And I was kind of anguished.”

Seven small votive candles are lit as footlights. Then Tong quietly, solemnly walks on stage carrying an overnight-size black suitcase.

In March, 1976, the FramartGaiiery of Naples, Italy, sponsored the performance of an original Allan Kaprow work, Maneuvers. By previous arrangement, Kaprow had been commissioned to prepare a performance scenario of his choice to be performed, under his supervision and with his participation, by friends and patrons of the gallery.

Kaprow designed and sent on ahead a brief scenario of actions that could be carried out in unspecified locations, private or public, by participants working in couples. No formal audience would be present, and couples would be generally free to choose the place and time for performing each phase of the scenario. Because there would be no direct supervision of the couples as they performed, participants would be on their own to interpret the directions given in the scenario. Any even number could participate in the event.

The pantomime, Pierrot Assassin of His Wife—one of the most extraordinary solo performances of the late 19th century—was first created in 1881 by a stage-struck twenty-one-year-old Parisian student, Paul Margueritte, who spent his summer vacations outside the city putting on amateur theatre in an old barn loft. For the rest of the decade, Margueritte, although embarked upon a successful literary career, continued to present his pantomime whenever and wherever he could—for friends and relatives, before peasants in rented rural ballrooms, in fashionable Parisian salons for elite private audiences of artists and writers, and at special showings in professional theatres.

A radically new interpretation of the traditional comic figure derived from cornmedia dell'arte, Margueritte's macabre Pierrot contributed directly to the revival of pantomime that characterized the 1880's: Margueritte quickly became celebrated, and his work was written up in popular magazines; Stéphane Mallarmé, Edmond de Goncourt, Alphonsé Daudet, and André Antolne were among the admirers of Pierrot Assassin of His Wife.

Curtain

The room with its paneling of dark old oak is dim and gloomy; against the wall, here a wardrobe, there a dresser; a chair to the right, a table to the left, bottles on the floor, their necks broken.