Thomas Mulready: Outtakes from The Performance Art Festival

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OUTTAKES FROM THE PERFORMANCE ART FESTIVAL
by
Thomas Mulready

The most memorable thing that comes to mind is the sheer volume of performance artists floating around the Performance Art Festival each year, some performing, most watching and discussing -- young artists, established artists, students, teachers, groups and lonely solo artists.

The audience discussions are invariably some of the most memorable moments. We always do audience discussion after each work, or at least at the end of each evening, and some of those got quite intense. When the group Rituals from Piqua, Ohio cut the head off a live chicken, almost every member of the audience stayed for the discussion. That one managed to offend even the most hardcore performance art fan by challenging the politically correct position of most of the audience.

The ongoing discussion with Zygmunt Pio Trowski of Poland during year two (1989) sort of set the tone for the whole event. Here was someone who had so little English but could make the whole town stop and listen. His message was, "Performance art is not for money, it should be for education."

Of course, Kain Karawahn of Berlin caused a sensation in 1993 by throwing fire outside against a building and then turning on the audience of 500 fascinated onlookers. The first time he charged, everyone backed up a step, the next time he came at the crowd, everyone moved a step closer. Fire is like that.

When Ivan Rados of Bosnia stripped, painted himself white and led the crowd out of the Colonial Ballroom through Public Square past a gospel concert, the concert patrons just glanced at him, bored. Here we were carrying boom boxes and huge torches while this naked white guy carrying a nine-foot red star stumbled across town with an entourage of 100. The cops even pulled up next to us, surveyed the scene, and moved on.

It wasn't until later, when Rados had brought us under the Lorain-Carnegie bridge and began his fire ritual with a 2000-watt sound system accompanying him, that the police started to really take notice. At least ten patrol cars arrived on the scene just as he was finishing up what looked to them like a satanic ritual, while a bunch of mild-mannered arts patrons stood around silently watching.

Fortunately, due to some fast talking and the brandishing of our catalogs and legitimate-sounding funders, the cops let him finish and just took off while we walked everyone back to the Ballroom safely. A half hour later that one of the cops thought it might be a good idea to get some names and phone numbers, just in case. We waited the next day to see if the prosecutors would be in touch, but we never heard from them.

The one time we did see the prosecutors was for Annie Sprinkle in 1990. Her show was notorious thanks to Jesse Helms, and the television news media made us the lead story for the entire weekend. Certain parts of her performance dealing with her body were problematic relative to the Ohio Revised Code, and all board members and staff members came to the theatre that night with our toothbrushes stuck in our pockets in a show of support in case we ended up in jail that night.

Undercover vice were in the audience. We picked them out right away, and we were chatting with them. They told us they were just "theatre lovers."

We told Annie that she could do whatever she wanted, that we were prepared to support it as art. However, she was headed to Europe in a couple of days and she wasn't as willing as us to spend time in a Cleveland correctional facility. She used the offending passages to highlight the issues, then after the show she charged patrons $5 for an hilarious Polaroid of her prodigious tits on their head!

Unbelievably, the undercover cops took this evidence to the prosecutor, and we heard about it before the following night's performance.

The irony was that Blue Man opened each of those shows and they blew everyone away, and its kind of funny that the controversy always overshadows the art.

You know, I could go on and on, and sometimes I do and people just look at me like I'm making this stuff up. But when you see over a hundred performance artists doing the wildest things imaginable, (and many unimaginable) you really end up with some great stories. I think I've decided that that's really what life is really all about. In the end, you're left with excellent stories. Just tell me when to stop.

"Outtakes from The Cleveland Performance Art Festival" is c1999 Thomas Mulready. Mulready, the Founding Director of the Cleveland Performance Art Festival, can be reached at info@performance-art.org

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