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The Copy Cat Theater will present the second Rooms Play this year as part of the Transmodern Festival, Baltimore’s experimental culture festival. Alex D’agostino and Hoesy Corona spoke with me about the connection between their visual art and their performance work (both artists studied painting as undergrads), as well as their experience working with the Copy Cat Theater.
Recently Corona showed paintings on the fifth floor of the H&H building, in a show called Natural Wonders. Ten canvases hung on two adjacent walls. In front of the paintings was an alter of lace, candles and rose petals. Next to the paintings hung one of Corona’s performance costumes.
I asked Corona about the content of his paintings, dramatic tableaux peopled by human-plant hybrids. Instead of explaining the paintings themselves he told me about working full-time during his undergrad at Maryland Institute College of Art, how he often had to crank out paintings late at night after an eight-hour shift at Whole Foods. This fascinating bit of biography may have lent me more insight than any information about what is properly considered the painting’s content; the image of Corona up late painting just to have something for next day’s critique makes me think about the coherency of the life of the artist. In addition to creating art, most artists have to work a job and pay bills. A lot of artists might even have non-artist friends and a social identity aside from being an artist. In this light the content of Corona’s work– the plant people and the performance costumes fashioned out of throw away-tissue paper and cellophane salvaged from his job as the flower guy at Whole Foods– starts to become intelligible. And so does the form of the installation in Natural Wonders; it is not a single image presented alone, to be contemplated in itself, but the accumulated evidence of a sustained discourse between Corona’s practical life and his creative work.
Corona and D’agostino speak about an approach to performance that expands on this idea of the cohesion of art and life. Instead of a single stage where one set is changed out for another, the Rooms Play consists of a series of sets through which the audience travels. The content of this year’s Rooms Play will be more overtly political than last year’s, but D’agostino and Corona would argue that the nature of this type of performance is itself political. Essential to the political is the question of enfranchisement: who is allowed to participate and to what extent. Corona describes the position of the performer in traditional theater as a place of privilege; the performer sits in the spotlight while the audience sits anonymously in the dark. In the case of the Rooms Play, the audience shares the responsibility of the performance with the artists. The substance of the performance depends on the viewer’s willingness to engage as much as it does on the set design and costume.
I was curious how a group of friends could be so supportive of each other to allow the type of risk taking I’ve seen in the performances both in last year’s Rooms Play and at the Copy Cat variety shows. Amongst my own friends, there is a code in place that keeps us from acting in erratic or unexpected ways. “Being alive is such a performance,” D’agostino reminds me. Everyday behavior can be understood as growing directly out of certain social roles, roles that correspond to a particular gender, class or race experience. Understanding one’s personal identity in the language of a political experience, one can move past inhibitions and feelings of shame and there, in the controlled space of the theater, expressively treat issues that one has less control over outside the theater, and thereby begin to move beyond those strictures. Although you as the audience might feel uncomfortable or embarrassed to find yourself sharing the stage with the performers, to find your own response to the play scrutinized as part of the performance, they’re inviting you to reflect on your own strictures.
I couldn’t help but relate artist Chris Kraus’ discussion of BDSM from her book Video Green to this scenario in which careful preliminary dialog creates a space for creative expression. Kraus calls BDSM an “emotional technology”, a methodical approach to sex that replaces old-fashioned courtship with carefully planned scenes which allow the participants to safely achieve intense sexual and emotional experience without having to actually get to know their partner in a conventional sense, i.e. through mutual friends, dinners, or dates to the movies. D’agostino and Corona talk about the dialog that precedes the performance, wherein they identify the aspects of their personal/political experience with which they are concerned. As collaborators they agree to trust and support each others’ boundaries, and then they begin to develop characters that treat their concerns.
D’agostino’s hosted one of the more sensational rooms during last year’s Rooms Play. A low lit room with black walls and dead tree boughs painted fire red, as though walking through the forest at night, you happened upon a Wiccan ritual where the priest asks you to put clothespins on his nipples and drive nails into a flayed goat’s head. I’m not sure what D’agostino’s relationship to witchcraft or sex is, but his audience’s response implied that there was something about participating in his performance that they believed might have real-life ramifications, whether spiritually, sexually or psychologically.
Many people were visibly uncomfortable. Some became angry and would not consent to participate. D’agostino related that sometimes audience members seemed uncomfortable but acquiesced until another audience member spoke up to remind them they didn’t have to participate. I’m going to avoid a discussion about whether it is wrong or not to drive nails into a goat head obtained from a Halal butcher shop. Even though I participated, I’d say yeah, it is probably not a good idea to desecrate dead animals’ bodies, even in the name of art. But what would be more cogent to this piece of writing, and what would find broader application in the future, is a discussion about the ways in which D’agostino’s room furnished us with examples of a graduated scale of political participation, from coercion to tacit consent to willing cooperation.
Rooms Play H&H Building Friday April 29th, May 6th: 8pm-12am Saturday April 30th, May 7th: 8pm-12am Sunday May1st, 8th: 1pm-3pm
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