I was headed to SF to participate in a SQUART (Spontaneous Queer Art) performance at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin.  SQUART is the brainchild of Laura Arrington, a very warm and talented dancer and organizer.  She is currently in residence at Headlands, which is pretty fancy if you ask me.  One of these days soon, I shall do a residency there, mark my words.  Anyways, SQUART has happened perhaps a half  dozen times or so.  I have participated twice before.  It’s when a group of performers get together, split into smaller groups, have a time limit of two hours to come up with new work that follow some criteria, perform it in front of an audience and a panel of “celebrity judges”, and get judged American Idol style.  The winning team gets a cash prize.  This time at the Headlands, Laura swung it so that we had 24 hours to create something.  Our criteria was that one person from each group had to stay up the entire night and they were featured as a soloist.  Something about turkeys and coyotes.   Create an installation in the room you were given to work in.  Something about “retreat”.  I can’t remember the other criteria.

When I arrived, Laura had me pick a number between 1-4.  I chose 3.  That meant that I was the 5th member of the smallest SQUART group consisting of Kiele Stewart-Funai, Pearl Marrill, Honey McMoney and Harold Burns.  I was pleased.  I walked into the old quarters of a military officer to find that lovely bunch.  They greeted me warmly and offered me booze, red bull, and/or speed (no one actually took the speed).  We all dove into warming up together, playing games, singing songs.  We had to get used to each other before we could talk about what we wanted to do for a show.

It was dinner time.  And dinner was delicious.  All forty performers convened in the dining hall for dahl, homemade sourdough bread, salad, vegetable curry, pelegrino or beer if you wanted.  It was fabulous.  I sat with by beloved art~wife, Sadie Lune, and asked her how her process was going.  ‘I hate dancers.’  One of her colleagues had a real bitch face until Sadie tied her to a pole and won her heart.

After dinner Ernesto, who co-organizes the event through the Off Center, brought us some blankets and a jacket from when the place was owned by the military.  These items became essential to our piece.

“Wreck” is what we called it.  We transformed the room into a ship.  The two rows of pillars that ran through the middle of the room became the masts.  There were chairs piled in a super modern way a la Honey McMoney.  The curved wooden benches became the walls of the ship.  And there was a beautiful bar in the corner of the room where the sailors would get drunk.

At one point during the 24 hours before the show Honey took a moment to observe the absurdity of our situation.  It was late night, we had been crawling on the floor and wearing panty hose on our faces and Honey says, “Who does this?  It’s strange enough that this is how we find our fun, but what’ even stranger are the people that come from San Francisco to watch us.”  We figured that there would be the other 35 performers in the audience and maybe 20 folks would make the trip from SF.    We were so wrong.  So many people came from the city to see our show.  I think maybe 100.  I don’t know.  A lot.  And in the beginning of SQUART shows, Laura usually induces some kind of audience participatory game to get people to loosen up.  For the Halloween SQUART there was a toilet paper mummy contest.  This time, she had the audience form one single line and one at a time they would have to explain to the judges why they should be the chosen audience member to help decide the winning team.  It was great.  The performers just sat behind the judges as the audience members were put on the spot.   The line was long, diverse and reinstated a hope in Sadie that people actually do like performance art.

The celebrity judge panel consisted of Kieth Hennessey, a dancer, Jess Curtis, dancer, Meg Stuart, dancer, and two dudes from the Big Art Group.  The judges are some serious hotshots with a few fancy awards between them. One girl lamented to me in the dining hall pre-show that she only shows “finished” work and she really cared what the judges thought of her.  I thought, ‘she’s screwed’ and I was happy not to be in her group.

Here’s what my group and I decided on.  The audience would enter in two lines through the middle of the pillars.  The pillars had performance artists with stockings over their head tied to them with old, wool blankets.  They were like sailor ghosts.

Opening image. Harold Burns.

And I was there captain at the far end of the room perched on a red, leather couch, candles lit behind me.  Suddenly, my team mates would drop from the poles one at a time and their bodies crashed on the floor.  Their bodies were scantily to nudily clad.  There were clothes strewn across the floor.  They writhed across the floor, collecting clothes with dragged limbs.  Finally they got to me.  This part took ten minutes.

Harold bringing up the rear.

One of my favorite parts of the piece was when we all looked out at the audience at the same time, the four of them in stockinged heads and me in a captain’s jacket.

Oh G, I love this shot and how it captured my fave moment of the piece when we all turned our heads to the audience in UNISON!

Then, the seaweed ghosts got hip to how cool my coat was and they did everything they could to rip it off of me.  When they succeeded, they revealed a blue, sparkly, tie dyed two piece.  We marched across the floor in unison and kicking high.  Our kicking flung the clothes into the air.  This was a good image, says Kieth Hennessey, but it was unfortunate that Pearl fell midway through the action.

Here we are doing the militaristic kick line, flinging clothes through space.

Next we did a nice little number at the bar where struck some tableau vivants and made rude kissy sounds to each other.  I wasn’t the only perf-artist in the group that liked to throw the term ‘tableau vivants’ around.

Hot. Honey McMoney and Harold Burns.

We all got on the bar and did a kick line that was waves of legs crossing and we talked all at the same time about radiation fallout, spirulina, iodide, radiation fallout, spirulina, iodide, radiation fallout…

And we dance. 5 6 7 8 and scissor.

Then, Honey stole the show with his go-go turkey dance.

Honey earned an Honorable Mention for his turkey dance, inspired by the wild turkeys running around the Headlands.

We broke out into song and dance.  What would you do with a drunken sailor?  We had white sheets tied around the pillars that we used as sails on a ship.  I don’t know if we really sold this part.  Judges seemed unimpressed with our drunken sailor diddy.

Hello, can't you tell these are sails on a ship and we are sailors saving ourselves from a certain death?

We ended it as though we were getting tossed around on a ship at angry sea, walking from side to side.  And then we collapsed into

a clump that referenced the stack chairs in the room.  Did anyone catch the reference?

The final image that references our chair installation.Rehearsing the drunken sailor dance & Honey's chair installation.

Probably not.  We didn’t know how to end this piece.  We were on the verge of scrapping  it when we realized we had 10 more minutes before show time.

So…we didn’t win.

My wife’s group won.

Here we have my wife installed underneath the piano and crying for the duration of the piece. They won. Damn it.

If you would like to watch the video, you can see it at http://vimeo.com/21633731.

Thanks, y’all.

PS

Images by Robbie Sweeney (http://www.flickr.com/photos/romeosghost/)

This is my mother!

Here she is wearing a headscarf in solidarity with the women in Egypt who have gone to the square and demanded their rights.

Because what the hell else are we supposed to do?

Now is the time to get up and stand together in solidarity.

Hello?  Who else is tired of living life as a peon of mass destruction?

So boring…so eff that.

The people have the power!

That is my mother’s jam right now, people have the power by Patti Smith and it has subsequently become my jam.  Listening to it daily.

The People Have the Power!

My moms says that what is happening in Egypt is not happening over there, it’s happening in the world and we are the world.

And my dad memorized this poem by Persey Shelley and recited it to me over the phone today…

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many – they are few.

We all better just listen to what mommy and daddy say on this one…

One of my perf-art muses, Philip Huang, recently had his video “Masturbating with Bible” taken down from Youtube.  Shocking, I  know.  It was a short film consisting of a very able bodied Philip, naked, jerking off and using the Holy Bible to obstruct the view of his penis.  As pleasing as this video was to watch, I really recommend reading his blog post, No Fags on the Moon, about it.

I appreciate what he said about queers fucking up the world as we know it, so be afraid.  I also like how he wrote about people taking responsibility for their own feelings regarding art.  If folks were offended by the “M. w/ B.” movie, well, that’s their deal.  Philip interprets the bible as a symbol in his own unique way, perhaps as a cock block if you will.

Philip says he got inspired to make this piece after David Wojnarowicz’s “A FIRE IN MY BELLY” got pulled from the Smithsonian’s exhibit “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” at the American Portrait Gallery.  I don’t know about that, Philip.  I mean no disrespect to my perf-art muse, but really I think he has kind of a thing for dicks and bibles.  I know that he loves Kirk Read’s whole bible destruction pieces, and who doesn’t?  Maybe it’s just me.  Maybe because I went to that screening in San Fran right after the Wojnarovicz’s piece was pulled and I got bored to tears by artsy ass blow jobs using fancy talk to take all the fun out of art.  I left feeling very much like eff art, especially eff the art world.  My homegurl, Cindy Wonderful, writes eloquently about the Fire in my Belly scandal on her blog.

So the eagle has long since taken flight from the tree outside my window.  The great American symbol of freedom.  That is how I think of that symbol.  And it is my responsibility to look at the root of my interpretation and conditioning.  It’s a bird.

Some of my favorite quotes…

“I always like to say that cinema without risk is like having no sex and expecting to have a baby. You have to take a risk.”

“We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can’t steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that’s how you will find your voice.”

“I always like to say that collaboration is the sex of art because you take from everyone you’re working with.”

http://the99percent.com/articles/6973/Francis-Ford-Coppola-On-Risk-Money-Craft-Collaboration