QUEER machines

of REINVENTION
rethinking PRIVACY
on DIRECT path to
81 SENTENCES

A COMPENDIUM OF SELECTED RESEARCH AND WRITING BY SAIC PERFORMANCE FACULTY

 CONTENTS

Robin Deacon
Rethinking Privacy: Contemporary Practices of Student Documentation and Distribution
From ‘Performance Research Journal’, Vol. 21, Issue 6: On Radical Education
Edited by Ric Allsopp, R. and Michael Hiltbrunner
(2016)

Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish

81 Sentences for Squat Theater Circa 1981
From ‘The Creative Critic: Writing As/About Practice’
Edited by Katja Hilevaara and Emily Orley
(2018)

Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey

Machines in Queer Gardens: Performance as Mixed Surreality
From ‘Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance’
Edited by Matthew Reason and Anya Molle Lindelof
(2016)

Roberto Sifuentes, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Kimberlee Pérez

In Permanent Process of Reinvention
From ‘Performance Research Journal’, Vol. 14, Issue 2: On Training
Edited by Richard Gough and Simon Shepherd
(2009)

Takahiro Yamamoto
Noise | Observation: Thoughts on Direct Path to Detour
From ‘Contact Quarterly: Journal of Dance and Improvisation’, Vol. 45, No. 1
Edited by Melinda Buckwalter and Nancy Stark Smith
(2020)

■■Robin Deacon’s studio
class The Inadequate Body
(2014). Image posted by
student Tongyu Zhao
114
PR 21.6 On Radical Education.indd 114
Rethinking Privacy
Contemporary practices of student documentation and
distribution
ROBIN DEACON
The first image is a scene in a classroom as
I present to my students a live, edited version
of the text you are about to read. They have
been asked to observe this lecture through their
phones, in video record mode. Once the lecture is
completed, the phones are arranged in the space,
and after counting down from three to one, the
recordings are all played back simultaneously:
As a teacher of performance in a North
American art school context, my conversations
with students new to the discipline frequently
turn to the question of video or photographic
documentation, and its lack of equivalence
relative to an experience of live performance.
The observations made are characterized by
a certain predictability, with a drift towards
discussions regarding the importance (or not)
of being there. Calling to mind Benjamin’s
observation that ‘the mode of human sense
perception changes with humanity’s entire
mode of existence’ (Benjamin1999: 216), I have
in recent years noted a growing generational
disjuncture in my interactions with students
regarding their approach to the documentation
PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 21·6 : pp.114-119
http: //dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2016.1239903
and distribution of their own performance
process and product. Anecdotally, I will often
explain in class that in my own experience
as an art student in the mid-1990s, taking
the trouble to use a video camera to record
one’s performance was indicative of a sense
of occasion and, usually, implied conclusion.
It would be worth reemphasizing this word
trouble, for, in physical terms, the memories are
of dealing with weighty, compartmentalized
equipment – a bulky U-matic video camera
with an even bulkier separate tape deck,
for example. Operating this equipment was
often underpinned by a state of anxiety – the
possibility of a tape failing, the battery suddenly
draining or some other incomprehensible form
of mechanical catastrophe.
Or one may also recall the use of a 35mm
single-lens reflex stills camera (in my case, an
Olympus OM10) to document a live performance
– and how this equipment required a very
particular kind of temporal strategizing on the
part of the photographer. This was to make
sure that the maximum thirty-six exposures
would not be rattled off too quickly (hence
losing a record of the climax), or under-utilized
to the extent that the artist and the recorder
were left with a sense of lost opportunity, the
level of disappointment post-performance
commensurate with the number of unused
exposures remaining on the reel of film.
I conclude by telling my students that the
possibilities for subsequent distribution of videos
or stills created through these procedures were
limited to the amount of tapes that could be
copied (one by one, and in real time) by pressing
play on one video deck and record on another.
This sense of limitation would also apply to the
ISSN 1352-8165 print/1469-9990 online
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
16/11/2016 15:46
 finite number of photographic prints one could
afford to have processed at the local chemist,
to be then sent out into the world via postal
networks, reaching their destinations in what
I imagined was ‘the art world’ some days later.
Many of the students laugh at these sorts of
recollections. But I wonder if my somewhat
rose-tinted musings of grappling with such
old technologies and networks of distribution
primarily reflect the fact that as a forty-
something professor, I can no longer rely on
my own experiences as a student to inform
my subsequent pedagogical approach. Kathy
O’Dell’s (1997) essay on the haptic, performance
art and the photographic document describes
an approach to the reception of printed
performance documentation that ‘is not
exclusively dependent on visual experience,
but relies on the experience of touch’ (74).
Published in Performance Research Journal
a year after I graduated with my first degree,
I note that in recent years this text tends
to elicit a discussion among my students
regarding its supposedly ‘dated’ points of
reference. Perhaps this may be understandable
in a climate of diminishing concern with hard,
printed manifestations of anything, let alone
‘photographs meant to be handled as much as
they were viewed’ (ibid.). O’Dell notes she is
writing at a time when ‘photography continues
to be the predominate form of documentation
of performance art, and … publication of
photographs in magazines, journals, catalogues
and books continues to be the chief way of
getting the word out about a performers work’
(ibid. 80). I keep on reminding the students that
this text wasn’t published that long ago.
Whatever the future holds for this text, its
concerns centre on what I have experienced
as being a fundamental shift in the means and
attitude towards the documentation of student’s
performance practice. Within the classroom
in particular, the proliferation of smartphones
and related handheld devices shifts our
discourse from one of trouble to ubiquity, as
cameras embedded in phones record not just
final performance pieces, but also incidental
activities of both work and play – the inchoate,
PR 21.6 On Radical Education.indd 115
the in-progress and other fleeting moments ■■Robin Deacon’s studio
class The Inadequate Body
of interest in class. Images captured are not (2016). Image posted by
just of one’s own work (as a phone is shoved student Juanna Gutierrez
without instruction into the palm of a friend to
record, seconds before the action begins), but
that of other students’ projects (friends and
acquaintances alike), as well as the collective
workshop activities of the class.
As processes of documenting are not just
geared towards recording artistic practice but
also everyday life (often in terms of everyday
life as artistic practice), the contexts for
documentation expand with no trouble at all, as
do the sheer quantity of documents produced
and the potential for further circulation. Despite
a tension between the desire for a certain
scholarly distance (relative to my ambivalent
‘friendship’ with my students on Facebook),
there is an undeniable pleasure when seeing an
image generated in today’s class showing up on
my feed and being exchanged between members
of the student group, and the world beyond.
I am intrigued as to whether these expanded
possibilities to record and share processes of
performance come with the ability for a student
to gain a genuine purchase on the implications
of the wider distribution and, by extension,
the ultimate intention and function of one’s
artistic practice. Of course, this question may
easily be reversed to interrogate the failures
of the curmudgeonly, technologically inept
professor. Like the image of the artist who falls
into irrelevance because of a metaphorical
failure to ‘modify the immune system of their
art in order to incorporate new aesthetic
bacilli’ (Groys 2009: 28), what is the fate of the
teacher who resists or refuses innovations in
the processes of recording and dissemination of
images? Or rather, beyond nostalgic musings,
DEACON : RETHINKING PRIVACY 115
16/11/2016 15:46

■■Robin Deacon’s studio
class The Inadequate Body
(2014). Image posted by
student Ji Yang
■■(right) Robin Deacon’s
studio class The Inadequate
Body (2014).
Image by Robin Deacon
116
PR 21.6 On Radical Education.indd 116
is there anything I can teach my students
about contemporary forms of documentation
and distribution?
In citing the use of the smartphone as a tool
for documentation in the classroom, I do not
aim to explore whether or not its use may
seduce or distract students from the ‘proper’
activities of a classroom. In the instances to
which I refer, the smartphone is incorporated
into the reception of the activity, and there
is certainly no concern that the student may
actually be browsing or checking their messages
rather than documenting. In exploring networks
of online sharing and distribution, neither do
I wish to contribute to arguments regarding
the supposedly lowered attention spans of
the digital native brought up on Facebook,
YouTube, Instagram and other such platforms
of associative visual and informational drift.
The implications of alleged neurological
shifts through the usage of and exposure to
online technologies (Carr 2008) may have
more relevance in terms of an exploration
of scholarly research methodologies rather
than the distribution of one’s performance
practice that are the concerns of this essay.
It is also important for me to acknowledge
that, despite my previously implied resistance,
I have, perhaps out of necessity, come to use
many aspects of these technologies in my own
practice as an artist, particularly in terms of
online sharing of images and video. But the fact
that I did not study with these technologies is
the crucial distinction I wish to emphasize here.
‘Painters begin with a canvas, video-makers
with a camera.’ A former teacher of mine wrote
this in terms of a supposed disadvantage felt by
the performance artist who ‘often feels that he
P E R F O R M A N C E R E S E A R C H 21·6 : O N R A D I C A L E D U C A T I O N
or she begins with a lack, an absence of what is
to occur’ (Howell 2000: 9). Seventeen years on,
one may speculate if and how such a sense of
lack may now be experienced and acted upon
in the perceived circumstances of documentary
over-compensation I have delineated. It could
certainly be argued that the performance artist,
student or otherwise, is as much ‘with a camera’
as the video-maker. What we may now lack is
the language to fully articulate the implications
of mass circulations of self-generated
images. There would seem to be a welter of
contradictory and partially formed experiences
around ‘technologies that create simultaneous
sensations of exposure (the whole world is
watching) and alienation (no one understands).
These bodily technological practices constitute
new relations between public and private that
we have yet to really acknowledge, much less
comprehend’ (Puar cited in Doyle 2015: 128).
Circling back to Howell’s notion of the
performance artists supposed sense of lack,
‘one needs to remember that one’s own body
is an instrument and that space and time is
a ground as tangible as any canvas’ (Howell
2000: 9). Moulded within the classroom, this
sense of a relationship between body, space
and time certainly is graspable in material
terms. We assemble the student body in a room
characterized by particular dimensions, facilities
and ambience. We close the door to the outside
world, and the class begins, the institutionally
mandated three- or six-hour teaching block
guided in increments by the clock on the wall, or
the corner of the screen. The exchange is in many
ways hermetic, cloistered even, albeit with the
occasional and inadvertent intervention of the
16/11/2016 15:46
 maintenance employee, or tour of prospective
students and parents walking in unannounced
at the precise moment of a student’s intimate
revelation or bodily breakdown. But here,
there are no ramifications beyond mild
embarrassment, and hastily assembled apologies
as the door is slammed shut.
The agreement to capture images within the
contemporary performance classroom may be
tacit and unacknowledged. It is, nonetheless,
an intervention with a potential to echo far
beyond these walls – whether consensual or
otherwise, any subsequent online distribution
of work and play created in the classroom brings
an unsettling of these solid elements. In terms
of online bodily presence, Carolee Schneeman
expresses a concern that ‘with virtuality there’s
the loss of materiality, of feeling in your
flesh’ (Schneeman cited in Smith 2016), while
Michael Wesch’s notion of ‘context collapse’
provides a useful point of reference in terms of
establishing the problematics of this in terms of
time and space. Using the vloggers relationship
with the webcam as an example, he describes
this in terms of:
an infinite number of contexts collapsing upon
one another into that single moment of recording.
The images, actions, and words captured by the lens
at any moment can be transported to anywhere
on the planet and preserved (the performer must
assume) for all time. The little glass lens becomes
the gateway to a black hole sucking all of time and
space – virtually all possible contexts – in on itself.
(Wesch 2009: 23)
Wesch goes on to describe a resultant ‘crisis
of self-representation’, that, for my purposes,
may be further complicated in dialogue with
the practice of performance art pedagogy
and a shifting landscape of documentation
practices. Here we may begin to interrogate
the role of the contemporary recording device
in the increasing rupture of the classroom as
private space – a privacy that is perhaps the
very thing that enables displays of vulnerability,
embarrassment or awkwardness, from nudity
to naked autobiographical revelation. Of
course, the generational disjuncture regarding
documentation I have referred to may also
apply in terms of definitions and thresholds of
PR 21.6 On Radical Education.indd 117
privacy. Therefore, what may be at stake when
an image is shared beyond the walls of the
classroom may be of a significantly different
order for the institution, the teacher and the
student respectively.
Video and performance artist Ann Hirsch
has made the provocative suggestion that
‘[w]henever you put your body online, in some
way you are in conversation with porn’(Hirsch
cited in Dean 2016). For many working with
explicit, body-based performance practices,
there is a recognized phenomenon involving
redistributions of the documented body that
in many ways confirm Hirsch’s assertion,
particularly those who may stumble into
territories of prurient commentary and
anomalously high hit rates without intention
(Stolz 2010). Does the repurposing and re-
contexualizing of performance documentation
produced by students (‘explicit’ or otherwise),
necessitate an examination of the relative
roles of the educational institution, faculty and
students in negotiating online distribution?
My conversations with students on their
experience of this suggests a vacillation
(on their part) between a sense of peril and
possibility, but ultimately, the acceptance
of a lack of control. As one of my students
articulately phrased it, ‘I have to accept the
fact that if multiplies, I don’t have agency.’ She
tells me about a piece she posted on Vimeo that ■■Robin Deacon’s studio
class The Inadequate Body
took the form of a breastfeeding tutorial. In the (2014). Image posted by Seth
video (which I have not seen), she demonstrates Nayes
DEACON : RETHINKING PRIVACY 117
16/11/2016 15:46

■■(right) Documentation of a
performance by Robin
Deacon (2011)1.
Distributed on YouTube
1
It is a genuine shock
when, after a section of
film, Deacon’s fragile
naked body enters, striding
across the hall to stand in
front of the microphone.
A monologue by Deacon
has been playing in his
absence, but now that it is
so dramatically embodied,
the perceptual join is made
difficult by his seconds-late
lip-syncing. What Deacon
presents in the The
Argument Against the Body
are a series of mind-body
problem vignettes. Each
section showcases (by his
own description) ‘a
miniature crisis of
cognition’. Scenes in which
fractured, out-of-sync
manifestations of Deacon’s
voice and body are
distributed across
audio-visual equipment,
and are designed to fast
track the audience to
a state of self-conscious
doubt. (Quaintance
2011: 38)
118
PR 21.6 On Radical Education.indd 118
the use of a breast pump, the intention of the
work being to elicit a conversation around the
fetishizing of the pregnant body. She tells me
about the video receiving an unusually high
number of likes and of receiving a series of
unsolicited and ‘suspect’ emails, including
requests for additional images of her body for
a price. She places the video under password
protection. She mentions a friend who
questions why she would do this, claiming that
these sorts of responses ‘follow the trajectory
the work is hinting towards’. The student
remains pragmatic. ‘All forms of documentation
are separate from the piece,’ she says. ‘It’s
a different piece when it’s on a porn site.’ In all
of this, the student implies no duty of care on
the part of another.
Perhaps it would be unwise to assume
a collective understanding amongst the student
body that such shared material is far more likely
to end up lost in an infinite glut of unsung,
unattributed and ignored images (in all their
weightless bulk) rather than manifest as a unique
and unruly meme. But considering McGrath’s
contemporary rephrasing of Benjamin’s notion
regarding ‘modern man’s legitimate claim to
being reproduced’ (Benjamin 1999: 226) in terms
of ‘the right to reproduction’ (McGrath 2004: 166,
my emphasis), a prevailing state of conflict
and ambivalence could be reiterated. All users
of social media may recognize that peculiar
anxiousness that paradoxically doubles through
an imagining of either outcome – a simultaneous
fear of both non-appearance and over exposure.
For the contemporary educational institution
in a supposedly constant, paroxysmal state of
concern for the welfare of those in its charge,
the possibility of external harassment stemming
from viral exposure may bring into the play the
image of the ‘at risk’ student. Doyle highlights
this pervading fear of anything happening to the
student: ‘this diffuse anxiety spreads across the
entire student body, as an object of concern.’
(Doyle 2015: 17). We may extrapolate a situation
where such paranoia may trickle down to the
teacher, who begins to wonder about the need
for a policy regarding camera usage in the
classroom as much as a laptop policy – the
P E R F O R M A N C E R E S E A R C H 21·6 : O N R A D I C A L E D U C A T I O N
latter to combat distraction in the present, the
former in relation to students losing control
of their decontextualized image in the future.
The aforementioned pleasure of seeing images
created in the class in circulation on Facebook
would now dissipate into a sense of this visual
and textual commentary as yet another form of
(very public) teaching evaluation. Should I be
friends with my students on Facebook at all?
What if I am friends with some students, but not
all of them? Why would they want to be friends
with me anyway? What about my own work
online? What happens if they stumble upon the
many images of my naked body in performance?
Would this make them think about me
differently as a teacher? In this context what
does ‘inappropriate’ mean? And why does that
particular video of mine have 308,806 views?
Paulimadonna 3 years ago
THE BEST PART IS WHEN HE SHOW HIS
ANUS ON 42.41. HAHAH.
Do I ‘like’ the attention? What is ‘like’?
Should I fear the possibility of instilling fear
in my students regarding the world beyond
the classroom? At what point does self-
consciousness bleed into self-censorship?
Vanchy58 3 years ago
This guy has a nice cock, good balls and tiny
butt, but he needs an urgent haircut jajajaja.
Can I ‘unfriend’ a student? Or is Facebook an
increasing irrelevance? What is Snapchat?
How should I read the laughter when I ask?
And should it bother me when they laugh at my
elderly flip phone? Or are they laughing because
they might have seen me naked?
16/11/2016 15:46
 Marcos Garcia 2 years ago
Long foreskin.
Does this make them think differently about me
as a teacher?
2Good2view 2 years ago
WOW at 42:41 you see everything}]
A couple of years ago, I asked a group of
students to bring into class an example of video
documentation that showed a live performance
of their own that they had recorded, but had
never watched. In class, students set up their
laptops, and individually watched themselves
perform these pieces for the first time. I was
struck by the fact that while many students
were generally able to articulate why they had
recorded something (for portfolio or posterity),
none were particularly able to articulate why
they hadn’t subsequently watched it. In terms
of responses to this exercise, my assumption
was that the forms of increased image creation,
distribution and accessibility to which I have
previously referred would lend participants
a blasé nonchalance to the act of watching
themselves. But before further considering the
very singular moments of reception I describe
here, we may want to de-emphasize our focus
on the viral to instead explore accretions of
non-distributed material. This may range from
the footage of a student’s (perhaps, private)
performed action in a studio found undeleted
by the subsequent user of a shared school
camera, to the ritual dumping of images
generated in a workshop onto the communal
hard drive in the classroom, perhaps (only,
perhaps) for later collection and collation.
I can only speculate as to the life of such
images, undistributed and unseen – only the
evidence of this material may disappear with
the end of semester departmental deadline for
the deletion of unclaimed files. Perhaps some of
these documents were rescued for the purpose
of this in-class exercise. But in watching the
students confronting these video documents,
what transpired was that there still remained
a very recognizable sense of aversion to seeing
recorded versions of the self. In our concluding
discussions, it seemed that this response did not
PR 21.6 On Radical Education.indd 119
discriminate between old or new technologies,
whether revisiting a video tape of an awkward
family gathering, a drunken selfie taken on
a smart phone from an unforgiving angle,
or, (in digital or analogue form) an ill judged
performance at a nascent point in one’s career.
In all scenarios, an overwhelming sense of
embarrassment tended to ensue, for both the
students and the teacher.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Juanna Gutierrez, Tannaz Motevalli, Alan
Rhodes, Ji Yang and Tongyu Zhao for images and insights.
REFERENCES
Benjamin, Walter (1999) ‘The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Illuminations, London:
Pimlico.
Carr, Nicholas (2008) Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Atlantic
Magazine July/August 2008 Issue
Dean, Aria (2016) Closing the Loop, http://thenewinquiry.
com/essays/closing-the-loop, 1 March, accessed 7 April
2016.
Doyle, Jennifer (2015) Campus Sex, Campus Security,
California: Semiotext(e) / MIT Press.
Groys, Boris (2009) ‘Education by infection’, in Steven
Henry Madoff (ed.) Art School: Propositions for the 21st
century, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, pp.25–32.
Howell, Anthony (2000) The Analysis of Performance Art,
London: Routledge.
McGrath, John E. (2004) Loving Big Brother: Performance,
Privacy and Surveillance Space, London: Routledge.
O’Dell, Kathy (1997) ‘Displacing the haptic: Performance
art, the photographic document and the 1970’s’,
Performance Research 2(1): 73–81.
Smith, Isabella (2016) Carolee Schneemann on Feminism,
Activism and Ageing, http://www.anothermag.com/art-
photography/8462/carolee-schneemann-on-feminism-
activism-and-ageing, 9 March, accessed 7 April 2016.
Stolz, Natacha (2010) http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/
interior-semiotics, accessed 8 February 2016.
Quaintance, Morgan (2011) ‘This is Not a Performance or
a Lecture!’ Art Monthly, September 2011, p.38.
Wesch, Michael (2009) ‘YouTube and You: Experiences of
Self-Awareness in the Context Collapse of the Recording
Webcam’, in The Journal of the Media Ecology Association
8(2): 19–33, New York: Hampton Press Inc. and MEA.
DEACON : RETHINKING PRIVACY 119
16/11/2016 15:46
 29
81 SENTENCES FOR SQUAT
THEATER CIRCA 1981
Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish

A philosopher once said that two people come to know one another by mutually regarding a
third element. Lin and I have been collaborators for 30 years. Our collaboration began with a
conversation about a performance we both saw, independently, in 1981. In this chapter, we
tried to write about how that experience formed us – as the third element that first brought us
together. We often import creative constraints into critical tasks, so here we wrote 81 sentences
(LH 31, MG 50), because of the year 1981. We divided those into nine sections of nine
sentences each, because of the reliable, unnatural beauty of the square. [MG]

1
I flew from Los Angeles to New York in Fall, 1982. I crossed the country to stay in
a friend’s thrown together sleeping area in her apartment on the Lower East Side.
In helping to make my bed, I discovered the flyer for Squat Theater’s Mr. Dead &
Mrs. Free. I vaguely remember looking at the woman floating in turquoise, a belly
dancer spacewoman with oversized headphones, and deciding to go.
Associations form between the not-fully-absent past and the not-fully-present
now. Like an over-sized, I mean gigantic, nude, papier mâché baby with head-
phones and video monitors for eyes. The baby sat in the corner of a storefront that
served as part of the performing area for Mr. Dead & Mrs. Free. I looked into those
video eyes and they filled with Esther William’s water ballets. Thirty-four years later,
looking at a performer, playing a matador in a performance (I am making) crouching
down and standing up on tar paper over and over again, I know that he is perform-
ing a water ballet of sorts that springs from the eyes of this monumental baby.

2
The source of the movement comes from a YouTube science video of water drip-
ping from a pipe. With his body he imitates the water falling. He does so within an

15034-0367d-1Pass-PIII-029-r01.indd 222 12/20/2017 6:58:03 PM

 81 sentences for Squat Theater circa 1981 223

FIGURE 29.1 Poster. Artwork by Eva Buchmuller, photo Klara Palotai. On the photo
Sheryl Sutton (1980).

unseen, colossal bullring, like an eye in a colossal baby. An umbilical cord stretches
between the two in an ever so tenuous way. At the time of Squat Theater, mod-
ern life and its dramatic effects were surpassing the experience of theater. A crisis
occurred among the New York theater makers as they tried to grapple with this situ-
ation. Many took Artaud’s statement ‘Theater must equal life’ as a mandate. They
removed theater’s passive structures with attempts at volatile unpredictability seeking
to capture the energy and charge of real life. Squat Theater responded differently.

3
Carefully crafted, rehearsed, and repeatable material was placed next to unrehearsed
real life. This prepared material framed and more fully accentuated the lively, action-
packed, not-practised life that Mr. Dead & Mrs. Free absorbed into its world, like
when a jeep screeched to a halt on 23rd Street which we watched immobile in our
raked theater seats. Two performers, dressed as soldiers in fatigues, carried a bloody
body from the jeep’s backseat into the theater through the storefront’s glass door.
They placed him in a hammock in front of the bloated baby whose large blinking

15034-0367d-1Pass-PIII-029-r01.indd 223 12/20/2017 6:58:03 PM

 224 Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish

video eyes had returned from the water ballet. Thirty-four years later, I watch a per-
former at a small table recite words based on the poetry of Charles Reznikoff, derived
from actual court transcripts from the late 19th and early 20th century America.
The performer recites a story about a young girl, named Bernadette, who works
in a bindery, counting books and stacking them. There are twenty wire-stitching
machines on the floor and a shaft that runs under the table works them all.

The books are piling up fast

and some slide to the floor
(Keep your work off the floor! The forelady had said);
and Bernadette stoops, stoops to pick up the books–
three or four have fallen under the table
between the boards that are nailed against the legs.
She feels her hair caught gently;
she puts her hand up and feels the shaft going round
her hair caught on it, wound and winding around,
until the scalp jerks from her head . . .

4
I hold a necessary piece of ice close to my heart when making performances. The
brittle cold gives me a distance and grants me permission to present words I do not
want to hear like the horror of Bernadette’s injury (immediately after which a rock
band, live onstage, blasts into the drumbeat and chords and screaming vocals of a
song with no apparent connection to Bernadette). I first saw this ice in Mr. Dead &
Mrs. Free with Squat Theater’s fearlessness in muddling categories; discombobulate
meaning; mixing trained and untrained performers; questioning virtuosity; and not
making sense. Mr. Dead & Mrs. Free was my first experience of what I now call an
extreme event – pushing all things to their limit with mastery.
[LH]

In January through April of 1981 I lived in New York City, and on one of those
spring evenings I ventured to 256 W. 23rd Street – which seemed a desolate area at
the time – to attend a performance by a group called Squat Theater.
They took their name from the abandoned real estate in which they, at some
point in their apparently illustrious past, had lived and made theatre, after coming
to NY from their home country of Hungary.
My friend Dave had described their previous production Andy Warhol’s Last
Love, and his immensity of detail instilled in me empathic memories not of his
telling but of the actual performance.
We walked the windswept streets of the Lower East Side, Dave claiming he was
taking me back to the subway, as he delivered an intricate monologue on some subject.
The night he chose Andy Warhol’s Last Love, I saw a garbage can with a fire in
it, three men standing around, and I said: ‘We passed that fire ten minutes ago – are
you taking me to the subway or not?’

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 81 sentences for Squat Theater circa 1981 225

5
Dave was like that – he’d get me to the subway, but only after planting a seed, of
which Squat Theater was apparently the most potent, firmly in the garden of my
psyche.
So when Mr. Dead & Mrs. Free opened, I had no choice.
Fittingly the final image of the production involved a 12-foot tall papier mâché
baby seated in the corner with televisions for eyes.
The televisions showed various videos in duplicate: a swimmer underwater,
Nico singing . . . it’s up to you New York New York! – but the baby could have been
standing in for my newborn love of performance, might have been the birth of
that love, of macaronic performance, radical in the way its mix of styles fight with
one another, betray one another, refuse to cohere into any singular, consumable
experience, and in so doing offer up some volcanic uncontainable looping rebel-
lious ecstatic yet oddly humble event.
I remember the performance first as a resolute structure – two parts, separated
by a curtain.
The first part, or half, presented several – I cannot say now how many – short
events; some live, resembling acts in a strange talent show, some playing out on
projected video.
The video I think showed a pregnant woman doing yoga, as well as footage of
her giving birth, and taking a shower.
Another video followed a trenchcoated man as he strolled through the (then)
seedy pornographic booths of Times Square and used a device involving a plexi-
glass tube into which he could masturbate in public, ejaculating into clear fluid.
The live parts I remember included a male violinist and a female singer, both
dressed in formal black tie as for a recital, performing a deadly serious classical-style
duet of James Brown’s Sex Machine.

6
I also remember a small robot, shaped like a squat cylinder, maybe two feet tall,
rolling around haltingly and emitting puffs of incense.
All of this happened in a foreshortened area in front of a black curtain.
Even with the relatively small audience of maybe 50, people had trouble seeing
the robot, and I like the others tried to angle for a better view.
I think the robot mutely announced act II: the opening of the curtain and the
big reveal.
We may have heard the drummer first, before the curtain opened, as it opened,
the live drummer sitting at his drum kit kicking out a simple but textured beat, and
once the curtain opened it revealed him as part of a larger tableau, a visual cornu-
copia not easily registered at once, and the opposite of the austere first act in front
of the black curtain, now removed.
The drummer perched in the center near the back wall, which was transparent:
windows facing out onto 23rd Street.

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 226 Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish

In front of the drummer, the room appeared set up as a café with tables and
even a few customers.
The giant baby with television eyes towered over the drummer in one corner;
in the other corner, an open door.
The disorientation I experienced, unsettling bodily and mentally, resulted in
part from the closure of act I within a normalized dark no-place of theatre, that
when ruptured made me wonder for a moment how Squat had created the ‘realis-
tic street’ effect for the backdrop.

7
When a bus zoomed past, bigger and faster than anything I had seen in theatre
before, like spotting a whale while sitting in a bathtub, I realized the street was real.
The violation felt so complete that as pedestrians hesitated on the sidewalk,
considering entering the café, and I could see in their looks that the presence of
the small risers full of people (myself included) looking back at them from the
opposite end of the café failed to compute, I felt naked, out of place, and com-
plicit in a strange ritual that vaporized in the light of day, or actually the light of
evening.
The lack of ‘action’ for some time seemed designed to allow for the radical
recalibration between the two acts.
In fact a vague story did play out, involving customers ordering, paying, depart-
ing, and a romance between a male customer and the waitress – entirely ordinary
behaviour, until the waitress emerged from the kitchen with the man’s dinner of
a flaming skewer just in time to see him depart with another woman, and clearly
distraught, she lifted the skewer, dropped the tray, and impaled herself, dropping
‘dead’ to the floor as the flames died away, and things were no longer ordinary.
To be clear, this all happened long ago.
Recollections of structures, conflicting styles, and the grimly comic affect
remain indelible, but of the events I remember only disconnected fragments.
At some point after night had fallen a jeep loaded with soldiers in camouflage
came speeding down 23rd Street, executed a hairpin turn up, jumped the curb and
screeched to a halt on the sidewalk.
I know this happened after dark because I remember the blinding headlights
through the glass wall.
It was another in a series of jarring episodes, making me wonder again if these
were actors or if something had gone wrong.

8
Several soldiers rushed in through the open door, carrying one on a stretcher.
The drums reached a fever pitch, one soldier put his head under the blanket and
appeared to fellate the wounded soldier whose body soon lurched up to a seated
position as he sprayed blood out of his mouth, then collapsed (Mr. Dead).

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 81 sentences for Squat Theater circa 1981 227

Somewhere a man’s voice had starting singing, a kind of rap ballad, along with
the drums, its words all about the Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free of the title.
I thought he was on a soundtrack until a slight movement caught my eye, and
I saw one of the soldiers crouching by the wall with a microphone, then creeping
into the light, and finally taking centre stage with his song.
The extant documentation of Mr. Dead & Mrs. Free, the descriptions and the
few online photographs, have filled in some of my memory’s substantial blanks.
The very prominent willowy-figured black woman dancer in tropical garb,
who joined the singing soldier, completely vanished from my recollection.
I had forgotten both her and the earphones she wore – huge 1981 earphones,
like silver boxes with antennae affixed to the sides of her head.
The giant baby in fact wore papier mâché replicas of those giant earphones, and
I had forgotten those as well.
I forgot the two adolescent girls who wandered through the performance, con-
versing about their uneventful plans for the evening, their words amplified through
the sound system.

9
My memories are not inaccurate, only incomplete.

FIGURE 29.2 On the Front: A scene from Squat Theater’s Mr. Dead & Mrs. Free (left to
right) Yogi (the German Shepard), Peter Halasz, Stephan Balint, Peter Berg, Sheryl
Sutton 1980. Photo Klara Palotai. 256 West 23rd street, NYC.

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 228 Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish

At the end, I recall distinctly, a man stood on the sidewalk, leaning up against
the glass wall, looking in.
I don’t remember how he got there, or how he got his entire arm with the
bouquet he held through a hole in the glass, so while he stood outside the café his
arm was inside.
The performance ended when, timed with Nico’s singing New York New York
in the baby’s TV eyes, this man walked away but his arm remained, suspended on
the inside of the glass: an artificial arm, flowers in hand.
That spring night, at the age of 21, I found my way back to my upper west side
apartment in a kind of disturbed trance, discomforted, like being forced to allow
for a new space opening or unfolding inside my body.
35 years later I can readily conjure that entrancement.
The spell the performance cast in me never faded; the door that it opened never
closed.
Three years later I met Lin Hixson, and we discovered we had both seen
Mr. Dead & Mrs. Free – maybe we even attended the same night.
Ours was the first conversation I had on the subject of the performance that
I carried with me for three years silently, and I realized only then, listening to Lin,
my love for it and that life could after all be like that.
[MG]

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 In Permanent Process of Reinvention
Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Roberto Sifuentes and Kimberlee Pérez pause to reflect
upon La Pocha Nostra’s permanently unfolding methodology and pedagogy

An extended version of this conversation will be part For four years, the Pocha Nostra summer and
of Gomez-Peña’s and Sifuentes’s new book Radical winter schools have become amazing artistic and
Performance Pedagogy, forthcoming from anthropological experiments in how artists from
Routledge.
three generations and many countries, from
January 2009: Tucson, Arizona; every imaginable artistic, ethnic and subcultural
February: Virtual space background begin to find common ground.
Performance becomes the connective tissue and
Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes lingua franca. Chicana cultural theorist
discuss the currency of their performance Kimberlee Pérez enters the conversation via the
pedagogy while they conduct their two-week Internet. Her interventions generate another
intensive performance workshop involving layer of issues and demand that the dialogue
twenty-five local and international artists. expand in a non-linear manner.

119
Pe rf o r m a n c e R e s e a r c h 1 4 ( 2 ) , p p . 1 1 9 - 1 2 8 © Ta y l o r & F ra n c i s L td 2 0 0 9
D O I : 1 0 . 1 0 8 0 / 1 3 5 2 8 1 6 0 9 0 3 3 1 9 67 9

part 1 the beginning
of a new era
Guillermo Gómez-Peña: With the arrival of
Obama, the US and the rest of the globe are now
breathing a deep sigh of relief. It’s like we just
woke up from an epic nightmare. We are
experiencing a radical political shift, and there is
tremendous public optimism, a naïve optimism
regarding the immediate future. And the question
for us is – how is this major paradigm shift going
to affect our art work? Will this new zeitgeist
require a new methodology? I just don’t know.
Crucial pedagogical questions remain. How can
we develop a stronger and more inclusive sense of
community, even if temporary, through art-
making? How can we become better border-
crossers and well-rounded citizens? How can we
exercise our full citizenship through performance
and not feel so marginalized? And how can we
stand up and talk back to power, ¿que no?
Kimberlee Pérez: I love the way your questions
move through the layers of performance and its
possibilities, the political doing of it. You
describe a pedagogy of radical inclusion –
Gómez-Peña/Sifuentes/Pérez
community generates resistance. While I find
communities can be productive, I am also
suspicious of ‘community’. Do you find in
workshops that some voices are silenced by those
with more power or cultural capital? How do you
negotiate a politic of resistance while
confronting the unequal relations of power
among participants?
Roberto Sifuentes: Our objectives are to create
free zones, ‘demilitarized zones’, where volatile
issues can be addressed. There is a distinction
between the work of creating images and the
power dynamics that might come out in the
group. In those cases, the group members will
often call each other on their shit. Of course, it
has happened that sometimes people go too far
in exerting power over another participant, and
we have to take them aside and talk with them.
KP: So, overall, as groups develop their identity
as a collective they begin to dialogue across
difference. What do you do when self-segregating
groups form and branch out on their own in the
workshop?
120
 RS: Socially, people will inevitably gravitate into
In Permanent Process of Reinvention
groups for one reason or another. Our
pedagogical approach during workdays is to shift
partners around so that people don’t work
exclusively with their friends and they create
new, unexpected bonds through performance
work. But everyone is their own social being, and
people have different ways to decompress after
the workshop, and we have to respect that as well.
GGP: One of the challenges in this respect is to
try to avoid clicas – small groups of people who
tend to gravitate towards those who are similar
to them as a mechanism of defense.
KP: Give me some examples.
GGP: Say the five or six theatre students who are
a bit intimidated by the more adventurous
performance artists or by the image-savvy art
students … or the heteros who are dealing with
their fears of proximity vís-à-vís the gays and
lesbians. They tend to hang out together,
especially in the first three days. And when we
sense it, we pair them with people they normally
wouldn’t collaborate with. It’s a delicate matter,
and it has to be done indirectly and
diplomatically as to not make anyone feel
self-conscious. The ultimate goal is to create a
common ground.
KP: Outside of the microcosm of any particular
group, can you discuss your motivation for
holding workshops?
GGP: There are several objectives. To name but a
few (I quote from a workshop document), ‘To
develop new models for relationships between
artists and communities, mentor and apprentice,
which are neither colonial nor condescending …
To find new modes of being and relating laterally
to ‘the other’ in an un-mediated way, bypassing
the myriad borders imposed by our professional
institutions, our religious and political beliefs
and pop-cultural affiliations. To experience this,
even if only for the duration of the workshop, can
121
have a profound impact in the participant’s
future practice’. Another important objective is
to discover new ways of relating to our own
bodies. Firstly, decolonizing them, then re-
politicizing them as sites for activism and
embodied theory, for memory and reinvention,
for pleasure and penance. All these motivations
overlap.
RS: Certainly one of the many objectives of the
workshop is to create a network of rebel artists.
Hopefully the Pocha methodology becomes a
common language for these artists to jam
together, to exchange ideas, to create art groups
in their own cities. We see these networks
sustaining themselves through blogs and social
networking sites, creating projects and festivals
with one another in different cities and
countries. And, most importantly, these new
networks happen without us. Although, it is
harder to gather these artists when the globe is
in the midst of total economic collapse. This will
have a very direct and immediate impact in our
work and our pedagogy.
GGP: You mean from now on we have to buy
cheaper props? [laughter]
part 2 opening up the methodology
‘Roberto and I are taking a break from the
workshop and having a beer at the Congress
Hotel. As exhaustion begins to sink in, we feel a
bit insecure about the methodology. Part of our
political praxis has been to open up our
methodology to criticism and use this criticism
as a challenge to constantly reinvent and expand
the Pocha method in situ. We reflect on the
shortcomings and challenges of our border
methodology. Kimberlee enters the dialogue
laterally, forcing Roberto and I to step out of our
zones of comfort.’ (Gómez-Peña)
RS: Most of the responses to our methodology
have come from actual participants during a
workshop. And in the days following, we respond
to these challenges by shifting the nature of
certain exercises and inventing new ones on the
spot.
GGP: It’s a living method for live art practice. For
the past twelve years we have been developing
this performance practice and these training
methods as we tour, in between projects and with
very little time to reflect.
RS: It’s the same way we develop our performance
work, in response to the moment, with a sense of
urgency and immediacy …
GGP: … case by case.
RS: So, how do we translate our adaptive practice
to other artists working in similar situations?
GGP: Tough question. Here’s another one: How
can we translate all the challenges of a live art
workshop such as ours into a book format, a
performance handbook for the twenty-first-
century young bohemian?
RS: How can we even find the respite and support
to reflect on the praxis and write about it? These
questions and frustrations are at the centre of
our living praxis.
[Kimberlee enters the discussion via the Internet]
KP: Ethno-techno begins some of the descriptive
work of how you practice the methodology, but
I am also interested in your pedagogical praxis –
to theorize these kinds of reflections and
experiences. Where does your pedagogy meet
your methodology? How do you as facilitators/
pedagogues navigate the politics of relation
among participants? What do those moments
look like?
GGP: Today, in our clumsy attempt to be more
egalitarian, we have ceded a lot of control to
some of the participants, and they are running
with it. This is good in the sense that it empowers
Gómez-Peña/Sifuentes/Pérez
them tremendously, but it is also affecting the
normal course of the exercises. It’s a delicate
border we have to negotiate.
RS: Definitely, some stronger voices and
personalities have taken the power. They have
even somehow militantly structured how the
group engages in dialogue in order that everyone
is ‘heard’. It’s interesting to watch how they are
figuring it out.
KP: An ecstatic, if messy, process for sure. Can
you talk about your positionality when power-
shifts, complex interactions and images and
messiness take over the workshop in ways that
do not move the workshop in productive
directions?
RS: Our subtle performance strategy is to simply
turn off their microphone and eventually they get
the hint. (LOL)
GGP: Or take one of the antagonists of a conflict
out for coffee or for a long walk and talk to them
individually, and with compassion try to sort
things out.
RS: Really, those are some of the adjustments
that happen on a day to day basis. You remember
in Portugal, from a very small group there
emerged a strong puritanical opposition to the
presence of wine in the evening sessions of the
workshop. All of the sudden we were devoting a
whole dialogue session to the subject of
temperance, where some attempted to impose
their morality on the group. This was certainly a
heavy moment of imposed power. The group as a
whole eventually came to an understanding that
people could do whatever the hell they wanted to,
rather than be driven by a moral and minority
opinion.
GGP: Performance is a unique and elliptical form
of democracy, a wonderfully clumsy form of
democracy. You get dirty, but it works. It’s a
122
 horizontal model. It involves the active
In Permanent Process of Reinvention
participation of everyone present, the constant
fleshing out of our civic, aesthetic and
theoretical muscles. But the rules and dynamics
change depending on the composition of every
group. Some groups work better than others. And
this you just can’t predict.
KP: Certainly. I would also like to hear you talk
about your strategy for generating democratic
performance communities in the workshop
setting. What are your base premises,
foundations, and how do you introduce,
maintain, and develop them as the workshop
unfolds (or unravels)?
GGP: The strategies for inclusion require a
specific knowledge that comes with experience.
How to make everyone feel included and
everyone’s voice feel important. How to not be
authoritarian, while at the same time be able to
123
lead. How to listen to the participants’ needs and
complaints and incorporate them into the
process. These are the challenges of a
performance facilitator, an intellectual MC, and
I want to believe we are getting a little better at it
every year.
RS: Right. And the workshops invite and appeal
to a range of participants, from multiple kinds of
artists to students and theorists who are not
necessarily familiar with the language of
embodiment. As facilitators, it is important to
allow the participants who don’t necessarily
come from a strictly movement background to
discover and invent points of entry into the
process. Though we often have requests for
participants to only step back and observe, it is
important for everyone to do the physical work.
After some days of participating in all of the
exercises, they translate their own métier into
the Pocha process organically.

GGP: These are questions and challenges
continually raised by theorists and other
pedagogues. One theorist from NYU once asked
us a very pertinent question: Can artists who
aren’t physically trained as performers enter our
practice? I think it is useful if participants have
some kind of performance, theatre, dance or
martial arts training in their background, but it
isn’t absolutely necessary.
RS: As performance artists, the body is essential
to our practice. So if an artist has an extreme
phobia of being looked at or even touched, then
perhaps this is not the right workshop for them.
There are always artists with less physical
training than others, and that’s fine. Each
workshop changes depending on the make-up of
the group. Visual artists, sculptors and video
artists have found our method useful in the
sense that the exercises help them to develop
unusual, original imagery that they can apply to
their practice.
GGP: Curiously, theatre practitioners have a
harder time, despite their training, because they
Gómez-Peña/Sifuentes/Pérez
are used to being directed, and we don’t really
‘direct’. We merely animate. We like to think of
ourselves as performance DJs. We step in and out,
hold the outer membrane of the workshop and
share certain strategies, and by the end of the
first week, we begin to encourage autonomy, and
that flips them out.
RS: What about theorists who are interested in
performance but rarely use their bodies? Many
theorists are looking for a way to embody their
theory and a Pocha workshop can be very useful.
KP: What I find generative and exciting about the
workshops is the way Pocha maintains a border
methodology towards the theorist/practitioner
binary and emphasizes embodied theory. Can you
talk more about how the teachers and theorists
who aren’t necessarily performers enter the
workshop?
RS: We always engage and invite theorists who
have never done any form of performance
practice and who are interested in experiencing
performance in their bodies and writing. We
124
 encourage them to integrate or adapt what they
In Permanent Process of Reinvention
experience in the workshop into their own
classroom pedagogy. They find new strategies in
the workshop setting.
GGP: I welcome wholeheartedly the presence of
theorists in the workshop, but they have to be
willing to participate in all the exercises, not just
observe. I welcome their presence because we
also learn from them. It’s an interesting
negotiation: both sides feel a bit awkward. We
feel a bit ‘observed’ by them, especially if we
know they are writing about our practice, and at
times they feel self-conscious. And to me, this
unease is necessary and can be a generative
place for dialogue. Uncomfortable situations are
always fertile ground for developing performance
material.
KP: As I recall, it was out of a passionate and
awkward moment between us that we came to this
conversation. How can we, as performers and
theorists, develop collaborative relationships
more often and thoroughly? How can we find more
productive ways to communicate and embody
theory, to generate one out of the other? What is
the role of theory in your performance work?
GGP: I see myself as both a theorist and an artist,
and to me this isn’t a contradiction. I divide my
time between writing and theorizing and making
art, and both activities overlap. I don’t even see
where the border between them is located.
RS: Each workshop represents an evolution in our
artistic and theoretical practice. So yes, the
workshop space (and this very conversation) is
part of a Pocha Laboratory that hopefully
generates theoretical discourse, unique images,
and ideas. Perhaps we can imagine the workshops
as ‘embodied think tanks’. But ‘theory’ does not
figure overtly in the workshop context.
GGP: This is yet another challenge we have faced
from theorists: How can La Pocha introduce
theory and discussion during the workshop in a
125
way that does not disrupt the hands-on work? We
haven’t entirely solved this one.
KP: Another messy moment – embodiment and
talking about embodiment. It is difficult to ask
participants to read theory, though suggestions
are made that, at the minimum, participants
enter with a familiarity of Pocha’s methodological
and performance practice, available in Ethno-
techno and previous publications. But I do think
it links back to our discussions of the dis/connect
between aesthetics and political consciousness.
They are sometimes mutually exclusive practices,
and participants inevitably, without
consciousness or sometimes discussion,
construct images or engage in relational
dynamics that are violent or damaging in
colonialist and other power-laden ways.
Theoretical introductions and interventions in
these moments can be so productive at
consciousness-raising and understanding. Not
that you can’t, or don’t do this work, but perhaps
an in-residence theorist/performer as a Pocha
member in your next workshop might be a more
overt catalyst to address these challenges?
RS: You’re hired! We always have a number of
theorist performers as part of the workshop, and
they are invaluable to the process both within the
workshop and at the discussions after hours. We
encourage people to discuss the work outside of
the workshop, at dinner time, in the bars or the
cafes, but they often tell us it is not enough.
GGP: Also during our one-hour Zapatista-style
discussion circles, we try to create space for
participants to discuss pressing theoretical
issues, but it doesn’t seem to be enough. This is
one of the main challenges we are currently
facing.
KP: How about constructing a theoretical parallel
to the ‘quick and dirty’ approach to image
construction – don’t think too much, just jump in
and do it. Quick and dirty theorizing. It would be
an interesting approach to integrate theory and
performance without disrupting the flow and
energy required for long workshop days. As we’ve
discussed, participants need to stay on their feet
and move, because once we sit down the energy
goes with it. Doing both simultaneously would
lend to developing a taxonomy of aesthetics and
consciousness more overtly in ways that allow us
to continue it outside of performance contexts
and into other public realms. The question seems
to be figuring out how to attend to the moment of
an image or an issue without collapsing from the
weight of the attending emotion or visceral
responses.
RS: Those moments of instant reflexivity often
occur during live performances of La Pocha’s
‘Performance Karaoke’. At the end of a given
performance we often have an open structure
where the audience is invited to join us onstage
and create their own imagery. Guillermo freezes
the action during the most radical moments and
calls out for the audience to look at the image
and make critical changes. Perhaps the critical
‘discussion’ does not have to be long talking
sessions but also moments of physical
intervention and reinvention.
GGP: Making art in situ out of the delicate issues
that emerge in the process seems to be one of the
solutions. Remember the Oaxacan workshop of
2007? The repression of the teachers’
insurrection took place as we were conducting
our summer school down there. And we had a
discussion about this. Do we stop the workshop
and join the teachers’ strike, or do we continue
doing what we went there to do? After a day’s
discussion, the consensus was to respond to the
political moment with our work and with the
kind of imagery we were developing; to use the
charged political context as a way to energize
and clarify our work. When we presented to the
local community our final performance, we
invited a lot of teachers and protestors to come
into the museum, and they loved it. To them the
museum became a temporary sanctuary, a place
for reflection.
RS: If La Pocha wishes to be congruent with our
Gómez-Peña/Sifuentes/Pérez
beliefs, that we are a sanctuary of rebel artists
from all métiers, national origins and conditions,
we have to learn to walk the talk. And this means
that the pedagogy has to address the needs of
multiple communities, including those
experiencing physical, theoretical and other
challenges. We are not a theatre school or an
academy of art. We are not interested in only
‘skills training’ but in the civic and ethical
dimension of art-making.
KP: That’s an important distinction. When you
place yourself in the position of pedagogue, and
articulate that kind of intention for yourself,
even when it is one that is in a continual process
of becoming, there are still questions of
accountability. If one of your motivations is to
calibrate cultural rebellion, how do you come to
place yourself in the position of pedagogue? How
do you navigate the hierarchy and power
dynamics laden in even the most radical models?
Who are you, and why do you want to teach, to
hold workshops? When you extend your own
methodology to others, how does it intersect or
construct a radical pedagogy? What is radical
pedagogy, how is it lived differently than the
university, and how it is related? How do you
theorize through this kind of pedagogy with its
attention to multiple existing and ongoing
communities? Why the workshop at all?
GGP: Ay Kimberlee, Roberto and I are writing an
entire book called Radical Performance Pedagogy
to play with these questions. In a sense, This
conversation is part of figuring it out,
workshopping ideas through dialogue. It’s all
about asking the hard questions, just like the
ones you are asking right now … but in a nutshell
I can say that the purpose of a Pocha workshop,
at least the conscious one, is to share some
artistic strategies for people to become border-
crossers and better artist-citizens. But I don’t
want to speak for Roberto. ¿Y tu carnal?
RS: We are interested in an ongoing development
126
 of the artist as border-crosser and radical
In Permanent Process of Reinvention
intellectual. Our emphasis is not pure physical
training, creating an arsenal of famous or
fantastical ‘super performance artists’. The
mainstream public swiftly maintains discourses
of dismissal and ignorance. Rather, our interest
is in nurturing socially conscious artists working
in experimental art forms interested in
collaboration across international borders.
KP: And so the workshops participate in
motivating cross-collaboration, emphasizing the
intersections of aesthetics and politics? If
Pocha’s performance and pedagogical imperative
is to reflect, engage and be a part of an ongoing
cultural critique and shift, how do you structure
your praxis in ways that account for the never-
ending indeterminate nature of the global politic
and make choices that reflect that in the
workshop?
GGP: Really what we are saying is that much of
the new work of our pedagogic praxis happens
long before the workshop ever takes place. It is
not a typical process of convocation and
127
selection. We have to be engaged in ongoing
recruitment all year long. Our performance
colleagues around the globe become informants,
pointing us towards younger artists in the cities
where we perform and conduct workshops. Our
responsibility is to make the effort to return to
these cities and countries on a regular basis to
sustain the network of newer ‘Pocha associates’
and support their work as well.
RS: Building a network of ‘graduates’ and
associates is at the heart of the praxis. Whether
we initiate it or not, participants create
extending circles of collaborators and
supporters. The community of performance is
indeed a global community in a very immediate
sense. From the UK’s New Work Network to
Facebook and others, we are connected in ways
that were not possible years ago.
GGP: Perhaps the next step is to create a website
with an embedded blog where people can
exchange ideas and collaborate in upcoming
projects across borders, a place where young
performance artists can go to plan, exchange,
 dialogue and engage in even more practical
matters: I need a certain prop or costume, does
anyone out there have it? I’m looking for an
electronic composer to create music for one of
my upcoming pieces, anyone out there
interested? Or, I’ll be going to Brazil, next month,
can anyone put me up? It would be like a resource
and exchange centre for performance artists
connected to La Pocha.
RS: Part of what we are saying here is that we
find that the work opened during the workshop
continues beyond its close. Part of that means
generating performance actions that culminate
in, and extend to, public audiences in our final
• Photos R J Muna
performance. The performative conversations
Gómez-Peña/Sifuentes/Pérez
among workshop participants and audience
members in that public space is a productive site
for what we believe performance can do – radical
community-formation, public criticism, the
practice of doing things differently, and being
part of the emerging contemporary culture of
hope. We hope that the shared ‘language’ of this
performance methodology can provide a base for
these ever-shifting communities of radical
artists, in whatever ways they continue and
manifest beyond the workshop context.
TO BE CONTINUED
128
Noise | Observation
Thoughts from Direct Path to Detour
by Takahiro Yamamoto

Direct Path to Detour (2017) is a three-part project, consisting of a group dance performance,
a published book, and a solo dance performance.
In today’s culturally diverse and globalized society, I find myself being unavoidably exposed
to multiple aesthetics, values, ethics, and ideologies from media, social circles, travels, and (im)
migration. This project seeks to evoke the various states that arise at the complex intersection of
cultural phenomena, social pressure, politics, post-memory, and the personal experiences of myself
and the participating artists.
Below are edited excerpts from the published book, Direct Path to Detour.1 It is important
to note that the writings that follow were hugely informed and inspired by conversations with
collaborators that were part of the production and touring process of the project: performers
(Julian Barnett, Ayako Kataoka, Crystal Sasaki, and sidony o’neal), sound (Jesse Mejía), drama-
turg (Lu Yim), costume (Heather Treadway), lighting (Jeff Forbes), presenters (Angela Mattox,
Rachel Cook, Drew Klein, and Erin Boberg Doughton). Each of them has inspired me artistically
and intellectually; I’m filled with respect, admiration, and gratitude for their work. —T. Y.

Noise which was to point out the importance of imbalance and

I’ve been thinking about the idea of ambiguity. Sometimes
I call it “abstraction.” Sometimes it is the unknown, or
obscurity. I would like to start with the idea that things
around us are mostly ambiguous. What we see and under-
stand clearly—articulated ideas, clear shapes of furniture,
harmonized objects, sharp edges of architecture, and so
on—are more or less rare. Of course, we constantly strive
to seek out harmony, connection, order, agreement, clarity,
shape, and the tangible…at least, I find myself seeking
some type of definition for things and ideas.
We are social beings, living in society with others. These
harmonized objects and ideas are also how we communi-
cate with each other. Language, for example, as a symbolic
method of communication, is a product of that bent toward
harmony and connection. A traffic light is created for all
the cars to be regulated and in order on the streets.
Still, I am fascinated with non-harmonized, abstracted,
noise-like things. Things that exist “around” those harmo-
nies, things that are usually dismissed, things that are
always taken for granted, things that are situated in
negative space, things that are mundane or even invisible.
discord as reminders of every noise that we are not able to
hear or that we’ve been hearing too much of.
I do admit that I usually get satisfaction from harmonized
things. They give me a sense of understanding, of proving
that I communicated clearly, of security…but if I give more
attention to the noises (some people might call them “white
noise”), those harmonized things can acquire a renewed
meaning.
As I am writing this, I realize how Buddhist this approach
could seem. Maybe I am a Buddhist. Maybe I am being
Japanese. Maybe I am just being Taka. Whatever.
Even in this technology/Internet-centric society, where
I am used to easy access to seeing and understanding,
I can’t look up noises or abstracted ideas online. I like it
that way. Once a noise is defined, it loses its core quality.
Noise needs to be perceived with awareness and a willing-
ness to surrender. Noise can be interpreted only with time,
because noise transforms and changes moment to moment.
Noise is something to experience, not to understand
intellectually.

When sidony o’neal—one of the dancers in Direct Path to
Detour (whose individual interdisciplinary practice spans
experimental sound, sculpture, drawing, performance,
and writing)—and I worked on a short improvisational
performance together a few years back, I shared Michel
Serres’s text on “noise.” 2 I still remember sidony’s response,
Harmony and agreement are rare, but also inevitable. In
this current society, we live with harmony, agreement, and
meaning as much as with chaos and noise. In observing
noise, I want to be open to the effects that harmony and
meaning have on us.

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photo © Matthew Gregory Hollis
Takahiro Yamamoto in a performance of Direct Path to Detour, Single Focus, Links Hall, Chicago, IL, January 2017.
Continually being thrown off balance is another thing;
if a state of complete balance is harmony, then I seek to
keep this harmony constantly dissipating only so that
it can be harmonized or balanced again. Maybe we can
deliberately access harmony for a moment but bypass
it toward something else? So that we never dwell in
harmony or meaning?
I am making a correlation between the concept of noise
and abstraction. In the midst of making Direct Path to
Detour, I started to lose the distinction between those two
concepts. Maybe as I move forward with my practice, I’ll
realize the distinction or confuse myself more and more.
Either way, this project has been driving me forward.
Observation
I believe that art—both ephemeral/experiential forms
like live performance and object/image-based work that
viewers can contemplate at their own pace—has a power
to engage with meanings and ideas. I am thinking beyond
the argument about art as mere self-expression or acciden-
tal self-expression—that engagement with meanings
can happen in various forms, such as creating, exposing/
revealing, defying, denying, investigating, observing,
criticizing, and playing with.
As a maker, I enjoy using my artistic practice to “observe”
an idea or a concept that I’m curious about. Maybe I find
meanings from the act of observing. Curiosity drives my
practice; I observe how I, as a performer, feel/think/do in
relationship to the task that I give myself in front of the
viewers (observers).
I find that I often resonate with liberal and progressive
thinking in contemporary American society. As I learn
more and more, I realize that I am a pure product of capital-
ism and neoliberalism. Maybe that has something to do
with the fact that I grew up in Japanese society, which has
been ideologically driven by capitalistic ideals, especially
since World War II. I get fulfillment out of working hard,
challenging myself, and accomplishing the goals that I set
for myself. In addition to this social factor, my parents are
extremely driven people, continuously encouraging me
and my siblings to act on things rather than to wait for
something to come about. Of course, as an artist, I don’t
make a lot of money (which defies that capitalistic ideal),
CONTACT QUARTERLY   WINTER/SPRING 2020    21
 photo © Lynn Lane
[Left to right] Crystal Sasaki, Takahiro Yamamoto, Julian Barnett, and sidony o’neal in a performance of
Direct Path to Detour, DiverseWorks, Houston, TX, October 2017.

but I notice that I find pleasure in productivity and in
striving for something bigger than myself or beyond where
I am at the moment. It seems that an investment in the
practice of observing resists these neoliberal habits that
have been ingrained in me.
In 2004, I studied with theatre artist Mary Overlie,
who, through the teaching of her Viewpoints method,
states that she values being an “observer/participant”
as opposed to a “creator/originator” when she makes
work or performs. It took me a while to understand what
that means to me. When I started making my own work
in 2009, I began to appreciate that way of thinking and
aspired to embody that concept.
From 2010 to 2014, I had an opportunity to learn intimately
about the late Japanese nature photographer-essayist
Michio Hoshino. With an invitation from director Leon
Ingulsrud (from SITI company), I was lucky enough to
research and play the role of Michio in Perseverance
Theatre Company’s original production of The Blue Bear
in Juneau, Alaska. One token of his candid yet profound
lifelong contemplation is the idea that humans are just a
mere part of nature, which criticizes the assumed division
between nature and civilization. His philosophy also
speaks to the cycle of lives—paraphrasing from the script
of the play if I may—from plankton to herrings, herrings
to whales, whales to fishes, fishes to bears, bears to trees,
then trees to plankton. Circle of life. And he states that
we, as humans, are part of this circle. His ideas come
from his experience of spending much time in nature—
observing living things with great patience, tenacity,
curiosity, and obsession.
I believe that Mary Overlie and Michio Hoshino have had
a big influence on my way of observing.
What this observing does for me, especially when done
during live performance, is to put a gentle brake on my
coiled-up, goal-oriented modus operandi. In this technol-
ogy/Internet-centric society, I find myself bored right away
when I don’t have access to understanding at my fingertips,
in a second. But this quality of observing requires perceiv-
ing at a slower speed, allowing me to be with the present
(what I feel physically, what I think at that moment, what
I see) rather than being preoccupied with the future
© 2017 Takahiro Yamamoto

Sequence, score in emoji form for Direct Path to Detour.

22    CONTACT QUARTERLY   WINTER/SPRING 2020

 (reaching toward where I want to go or what I want to
accomplish). I admit that as a choreographer, sometimes
creating a product takes priority over an awareness of time
itself, but I get a high from trying not to strive for the very
ephemeral minutes or hours of performing. This is also
what I feel and value when I view performances.
Yes, live performance always involves an audience/viewers.
Although I sometimes deliberately face the viewers, impli-
cating their gaze in my performative action and inviting
them to be part of the event, I have been learning that this
observation-oriented performance that I’m interested in
has a tendency to be all about the performers (myself),
thus alienating the viewers’ experience. So, in thinking
about viewership as a vital part of this phenomenological
event called live performance, I want to put as much consi-
deration into how viewers engage as with what’s being
presented. What does this “observation” in performance
do to the viewers as they go on a ride with the presented
experience, create meaning and narratives, and invest in
what they see? What kind of experience shall I invite the
viewers to travel through?
I don’t know the answers to those questions. I probably
won’t know the answers for a while, or ever. But this
challenge of holding both my value of observation in
performance and the viewers’ experience in parallel
fuels me in the making process.
Drew Klein, performing arts director at the Contemporary
Arts Center in Cincinnati, has spoken about Direct Path to
Detour in relationship to the idea of “protest.” As much as I
appreciate his perspective, I told him that I see the theme
of this project to be more in line with “resistance.”
I would like us, the performers, to observe while perform-
ing. That is important for me. What if observation can be a
form of resistance?
photo by Cristin Norine
Time tumbled in a square, 2017. Pencil on paper, by Takahiro Yamamoto.
photo by Cristin Norine
Vibration with Tail, 2017. Pencil on paper, by Takahiro Yamamoto.
The observation of noise. The observation of the non-
understandable. Even if it is just pure attempt, is that
compromise? If we find ourselves, in a society, confronted
with varying and sometimes contradictory sets of value
systems, would it be possible to observe that in-between-
ness without taking a side, without arriving at harmony
or order? Could we live in the noise? Could we perceive
ourselves and others as mere noise for a second, encom-
passing a greater whole? Could we be abstract together?
At this point, the question becomes, “Then what? What
follows observation?” The dramaturge Lu Yim pointed this
out to me during the production. Again, I don’t have the
answer at this moment. Intentionality of observation, or
embodiment of the observed/observing states might have
something to do with it, but I can’t articulate that, yet.
u
Direct Path to Detour is supported by the Japan Foundation
through the Performing Arts JAPAN program and is a National
Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commi-
ssioned by PICA (Portland Institute of Contemporary Art) in
partnership with DiverseWorks, CAC Cincinnati, and NPN.
ENDNOTES
1
To order the book Direct Path to Detour,
visit takahiroyamamoto.com.
2
Michel Serres, “Noises,” in The Parasite, trans. Lawrence
R. Schehr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1982), 121.
To contact the author:
Takahiro Yamamoto, yestakahiro@gmail.com
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