Scott MacLeod

Cricket Engine Gallery, Oakland CA
(w/Jakub Kalousek)
October 17, 2015

The highlight of the vernissage for our exhibition "Wa(i)sted" was this plein-air sumo wrestling performance. Every time we took a step, the pumps we had strapped to the bottoms of our shoes would inflate the inner tubes around our torsos a little more. The inner tubes were supposed to explode when they had been pumped up too much, but mine were constrained by the too-tight dress, so they just squeezed me tighter and tighter until I had trouble breathing. I won the match but Jakub had to cut my inner tubes open with a box cutter so I didn't suffocate.

Slunákov Ecology Center (w/ František Skála)
Horka nad Moravou, Czech Republic 4/18/15

In 2014, František (Franta) Skála built "The Garden of Eden,” a stone ship/barn on the grounds of the Sluňákov Center for Ecological Activities in Horka nad Moravou, a small village outside Olomouc, in the Czech Republic. I was invited to make a performance in this structure in 2015 as part of the Olomouc Ecology Days 2015 festival.

Originally I planned a performance called “Our Songs Will Keep Us Warm” built around an audio component that Torreya Cummings had already created for another project. Her Ascent/Descent (2013) featured two soundscapes composed from field recordings from the California Library of Natural Sounds (part of the collection of the Oakland Museum of California) of California species with increasing or decreasing populations. Produced in an edition of 300, these 12" black vinyl 45rpm records featured cover art by Isabella Kirkland.

I planned to spend 12 hours in meditation and simple activities while listening and continuously flipping over Torreya’s record on a turntable, like a monk structuring his day around a prescribed series of prayers, such as Matins, Lauds, Terce, Vespers, Complines and the like. But Franta decided that he would perform with me, and we ended up doing a much shorter hour long performance that was more humorous and entertaining than what I had originally had in mind. The new title referred to leaving behind the rigorous discipline of Winter and opening up to the embrace of Spring.

Span² Festival, Dilston Grove Church
London UK, October 19-20, 2001

Andre Stitt curated this ambitious festival featuring six week-long performance residencies each week for a month, including public performances once a week. It took place in a desanctified church on the edge of Southwarke Park, Bermondsey. I crawled up out of a cellar space trap door naked, dressed, shaved my head with a straight razor, and put on a sea captain's uniform.

As the captain, I looked through a telescope and "navigated" using various strings and "sextants." I mixed up large quantities of wet plaster, found another captain's uniform and filled it with plaster to make a human size dummy which I then laid on the floor. I made a plaster "head" for the dummy figure, with lit candles for "eyes." Then I lit two more candles, dripped wax from them onto my closed eyelids and stuck the bottoms of these two candles into that hot wax, so that I too had burning candles for eyes as I lay down next to the plaster dummy for the ending of the first night's action.

Three hours before the action began on the second day, I covered myself with plaster and let it dry over me, trapping me against the stone floor. I breathed through short plastic drinking straws placed in my nostrils and mouth. At a signal from Andre, I broke free from my dried plaster shell, did a few actions, and then set the plaster dummy's uniform on fire. When it was burning well on its own I stripped out of my own ship captain's uniform, placed it on the fire and crawled naked back into the cellar from whence I'd come.

The Lab, SF, 9/20/2000

I don't recall much about this performance except for a few details. I had the space in complete darkness except for a half dozen flashlights that I handed to random audience members who then had the responsibility of following my actions as mini spotlight operators. I had no light of my own. I know I had moved some people and sat them at a table behind fake name plates, as if they were contestants or judges on a game show. I emptied some cement into a small suitcase and poured in water from a galvanized bucket. I mixed the water and cement and stuffed it into a small child's tuxedo, making a sort of doll. Then I set it on fire. If anyone was there and has more information, please let me know what else happened.

"Three and a Half Days for Mental Health" festival,
Dobrany Psychiatric Hospital, Dobrany, Czech Republic
October 5th, 1991

Insane asylum at Dobřany: Saturday evening, cold spell/cold weather/darkness. After Barry Schwartz's deafening industrial performance had finished, Scott MacLeod was to collect the audience. A light came on not far away and a woman began to sing. When we approached her, she turned back to take hold of something which resembled a mobile coffin and began to push it forward. She wore black clothing and a black mask over her face. We arrived at some huge piles of coal. MacLeod, wearing a black coat, boots and a large dog muzzle on his face, rode up the conveyor belt and fell from it head-first into the huge coal pile without a word. He waded through the coal, dug big rusty iron lattices up out of it, lit on fire the sticks he’d been using for crutches. Holding them aloft he rushed off. We followed him. After five minutes he and the woman passed through a wire fence, but the audience could go no further. We saw them light some fires beyond the fence. (Scott Macleod performed at Dobřany last year already. Having seen his performance, one of the patients said: "He showed me my own life; including those horrible states, hallucinations and all….")
- from "3 and 1/2 Days of Madness" Lidové Noviný, October 6, 1991 by Martin Chlup, translated by František Stoček

In the middle of a dark night, a figure whose face is covered with a black cloth is pushing a zinc coffin out of one of the hospital pavilions. Followed by many spectators, she lights her way with a miner’s flashlight on her head. She goes through the whole hospital area to the remote furnace-room. She stops at a conveyor belt and opens the coffin. A man in a dark leather coat emerges from it. Leaning upon crutches, he crawls up onto the conveyor belt. The woman who delivered him turns on the switch. Driven to the top, the man is tossed down onto the top of a huge pile of coal. After he finally manages to get down, he sets the muslin-wrapped tips of his crutches on fire. He drives these burning torches into the coal heap and then bends down and heaves out a huge iron lattice from where it was buried in the coal. After that, with the help of the figure who delivered him, he turns a huge crank, pulling on a rope that leads into the heart of the pile. As the rope stretches more and more tautly, their faces reflect the increasing strain. Suddenly a huge heavy iron cross appears emerging from the pile at the other end of the rope. But then the rope breaks. Both performers then carry the burning torches out past the hospital fence, where they light several fires.

Whether you regard Scott MacLeod's performance as art or not, you can't deny its amazing impressiveness. Seemingly meaningless actions add up mysteriously. The spectator isn’t sure what is happening but the performer seems to know what he's doing. We have the same feeling as if encountering an unknown civilization that has gone its own way for centuries. Or as if we are witnessing a kind of mysterious ritual known only to a couple of initiates. One simply can't pull oneself away.
- from "Art As Ritual: On The Performances Of San Francisco Artists" Dnes, Prague, Czechoslovakia, October 9, 1991 by Alex Švamberk, translated by František Stoček

Having been very preoccupied with concern for how the patients where dealing with the festival, I became exhilarated when two of them came up to Laurie and me as we led the audience from the coal-pile to the edge of the hospital grounds. One of the young women put her hand on mine and helped me hold a burning torch aloft, while the other did the same for Laurie. Again I felt the unmediated generosity and gratitude that I'd experienced the year before. This was the most important validation of my efforts.

Another very emotional moment came as we were all leaving the hospital the next day.  With the festival activities over and the public long gone, the patients had gotten over their trepidation; our artists were able to spend the whole morning in close quarters with patients.  This is what I'd had in mind the year before, and when my eyes met Ivan's I had the odd sensation of being in two times at once. I felt very clearly the emotions of the previous year, with the attendant desire to bring others to this place that was so special to me; at the same instant, I experienced the great joys of having accomplished this dream and of sharing this joy with Ivan.

In July & August, 1991, M. Vänci Stirnemann brought together thirteen artists from Spain, Switzerland, Canada and the UK for Feed Back & Forth, an ambitious month-long collaborative performance project in Zürich and Vienna. Vänci had organized my Heimlich Maneuvers performance the year before and invited me for FB&F. There were also two English artists (Yvonne Austen & Mark Hudson), one Spanish (Victoria Zapata), one Swiss-Ethiopian (Roshan Linsi), five Canadian (Grant Poier, Colleen Kerr, Steven Heimbecker, Cathy Shick & Robin Poitras) and three Swiss (Jörg Lenzlinger, Patrick Sidler & Gido Dietrich). Vänci was a full participant. Fritz Vogel participated during the Zürich segment but was only an observer in Vienna.

Feed Back & Forth was a difficult project while it was happening but hugely important for me in the long term, providing friendships and insights that continue to reward me to this day. This particular page of my website can't begin to describe the complexities of the project nor can it include any of the often interesting performance actions that did not include my participation. So these performances described here are only the ones I participated in and don't pretend to give a complete picture of the whole project.

De Media
Eeklo, Belgium, 9/28/90

Jan and Bernadette DeBoever ran an very nice operation at DeMedia: they had a huge archive of mail-art magaziness, fanzines, alternative music magaziness etc, as well as a sweet little bar / café / performance space / gallery. They did great publicity and pay me a couple hundred Belgian francs for performing, but I was still having a hard time adjusting to being back in the West, and couldn't put my finger on why. My declining health didn't help. I’d finally caught everyone else's flu in Moscow and had been fighting bronchitis since. I woke up on the 27th with fluid in my lungs, found a doctor, got cortisone & antibiotics prescriptions, filled them. I do love cortisone.

My performance at DeMedia was again somewhat routine and uninspired. The actions and symbolic images that had been able to tap into something resonant for Eastern European audiences undergoing hugely stressful social changes seemed to mean almost nothing to my Western audiences. Response in Eeklo was as apathetic as it had been in Germany. At least I had enthusiastic friends here too: José and Mirei Vandenbroucke came up from Deerlijk with their Ohioan mail-artist visitors Mark and Mel Otto. Hanging out with them postponed my growing depression for a few hours. Also pretty good photos.

1st Int'l Festival of Contemporary Art
Moscow University Students' Theater
Moscow, USSR, 9/8/90

Being asked to perform inside this 600 seat theater, I was again confronted with the practical and conceptual challenges of a raised stage and a proscenium frame. As I had in Plzeň, I decided to acknowledge and amplify the performance's reality as a theatrical form. I built more of a theater set before the performance, with shirts and tree branches suspended above & behind a row of desks that faced the audience. I worked out a simple lighting design with the help of Contraband's Elaine Buckholtz, who equally generously ran the board during the performance. Becca of UK's Alarmist Theatre group was kind enough to be my stage manager and handle the several curtain openings and closings I'd planned.

I opened in front of closed curtains with some of the humorous pantomimed bits I'd used in the previous performance in Bydgoszcz, trying to use a bit of music-hall slapstick to quickly connect with the audience and to provide them with a perspective on the more staged posturings that would follow. Then with curtains open, I acted out some of the usual routines, including painting my head and fighting myself, as well as some new actions.

I again had some sort of unconscious radar operating when I went into the audience and brought four people up onto the stage and seated them at the desks. One of them was a fashionably dressed woman in her late 40s who upstaged me once by flicking dust off the desk with her hand, and again later when I was getting dressed after dripping hot candle wax onto my back. As I was putting my shirt and suit jacket back on, she stopped me with a touch, pulled them softly down off my shoulders and gently picked dried red wax splatters off my back with her blood-red fingernails. It was a very touching moment, but, as I found out later, she was an experienced actress of some repute whose playwright husband was looking for contacts with the West. Everything in Moscow was built of shadows, sewn together with flashes of light.

I was amplifying my gestures to suit the situation I was in, up there on a stage in Moscow in front of 600 people, and feeding off my adrenaline and the audience's responses in order to pump myself up into the state of mind of someone who enjoyed commanding the attention of everyone in a large theater. I was trying to use the situation to create a parody of it. The actress's peeling of wax off my back was a grounding moment that sketched the outlines of a vulnerability I then tried to bluster my way out of. I tied neckties on my neck, stood on a podium, made arm gestures and hand waves associated to politicians like Nixon, Hitler, Queen Elizabeth, Gorbachev and others. I got mad, striped off, threw my clothes into the audience. The audience threw them back. I finally piled my clothes in my silver bowl and set them on fire and walked off.

Miejski Osrodek Kultury,
Bydgoszcz, Poland, 8/24/90

I was the first artist to use the municipal gallery's newly renovated exhibition space. Elegant and high-ceiling, the two rooms’ French doors and parquet flooring reminded me of Versailles, so I decide to enhance this refined atmosphere, as a contract to getting naked and spattering myself with paint. I placed two long tables end-to-end in one room and covered them with a long white scrim borrowed from a local theatre. Most of my props were artfully arranged on the tables to give the impression of a formal dinner party. I set up all chairs for the audience in the adjoining and identical second room and closed the double pair of fancy double-folding French doors between the two rooms.

At the beginning of the performance, I kept entering and exiting the audience's room through the otherwise-closed French doors leading to the table room, doing short comedic bits, like vaudeville or mime. I had collaborated with a lighting designer whose idea it was to create the (false) impression that the performance would happen in the same room as the audience, and gave them just enough comedic vignettes just often enough to keep them from getting too restless as the evening went on.

After each bit, I would bring four members of the audience (carrying their own chairs) into the other room, seat them at the prepared formal table, and do one of the actions of the primary performance: the candle-wax dripping, the head in the water bowl, many of the usual actions, one new action every time I brought four new people into that space, with the doors to the adjoining room still always firmly closed. Then I’d go into the audience room, do another comedic skit, bring four more of them into the main room, seat them with the original four, and perform the next section. I continued in this manner until after about 40 minutes the entire audience was finally present within the main performance space for the last section of actions.

As in Piła, the piece seemed merely competent rather emotionally compelling, though I was very pleased with how the piece had adapted easily and productively to the architectural constraints of the site. I was also pleased with my ingenious manipulation of conventional theatrical expectations, so that no one in the audience had seen the entire performance, and every group of four had had a different experience of it. But, when I finally brought the audience all together at the end, I let us all down by not having a strong finale for the piece. Most of the audience members were experienced visual artists, and this post-performance discussion was one of the more interesting of the tour for me. Finally I found people who shared my feeling that this work had a relationship with Polish visual theatre. And we all agreed that at least a partial resolution of some of those expectations would have served better than the unfocused and punchless ending that I had offered up.

Klub Kulturka, Piła, Poland, 8/21/90

In April 1990, Krzysztof Kudła had helped start a new youth cultural club called Kulturka, which after a recent eviction had relocated into the basement of a large apartment building. A group of about fifteen young people ranging in age from 16 to 33 was responsible for the operation of the club, which mostly programmed young Polish punk rock bands. Artur, one of the oldest of the group, independently produced larger-scale concerts whose lineups often featured punk bands from Germany and other countries. The small, dark, gloomy, low-ceilinged, one-room club had an institutional feeling that immediately inspired a performance designed like a secret political meeting, or a kind of sinister star-chamber of an evil corporate bureaucracy. I arranged two long meeting tables in the center of the room and placed the audience in 25 or so chairs backed up against the surrounding walls. All my props hung from the exposed plumbing pipes running along the ceiling directly above the tables. Most of my actions took place on top of the table. At one point I brought four people into the performance, seating them at the table. I burned a dollar bill and made them each burn a 1000-zloty note that I provided. The audience was small, a dozen or so of the people who had a hand in operating the club. It was workmanlike and rather short, running about 40 minutes, probably because I was getting tired from touring, and I didn't get much positive feedback energy from the audience. The photos confirmed my impression that they thought it was all pretty silly.

Stadtbezirkskabinett für Kutlturarbeit Sud
Karl-Marx-Stadt (aka Chemnitz) DDR, 8/18/90

Graphic designer, artist and independent organizer of cultural events Stephen Jacob curated me into this municipal cultural center, the last one (of four) still operating. Several of my friends came to see me perform: Georgia von Stavenhagen came from Brauschweig, Aaron Noble came from San Francisco via Berlin, bringing me some paint and other performance supplies on his way to Prague. To my delight, he'd talked my Berliner friend Franz John into driving him down. After meeting so many new people in such a short time, I was very happy to be with familiar friends for a change.

I decided to perform in Studio Sud's huge backyard garden even though rain threatened. The outdoor performance in Kostelec had made me intrigued by the possibilities of performing in the natural environment, and here was another opportunity to explore that relationship. For a number of reasons related to long-time interests of mine, I decided to try a (mostly) solo recreation of The Thirty Years' War, a war that had taken a terrible physical and social toll on that specific region of Germany.

I started performing just as the sun went down, used the Kostelec firing-squad sequence again, as well as lots of fires and running and acting strange and dragging people around in the darkness.

There was a really nice moment when, after I'd burned down a 30 square meter field of hay, I dug down into the ashes and tilled soil and pulled out three large bright yellow grapefruit that I'd previously secretly buried. This performance confirmed what I'd suspected after Kostelec: the performance at Dobřany Psychiatric Hospital had broken down the previous rigidity and limitations of the piece and it had finally become what I'd hoped it would, a new thing that was adapting itself freely and quickly to the possibilities of each new situation.

Refugee (Brief Amaze)
Galerie H, Kostelec nad Cernymi Lesy, Czechoslovakia,
8/12/90

The rearmost of Galerie H's two large gardens is a beautiful and well-cared for expression of Jíŕí and Zdeňek Hůla's reverence for nature and craftsmanship. It was such a refreshing place to be after the confines of basement theatres, mental hospitals and department stores that I decided to perform there in the garden rather than inside the gallery. But Brief Amaze had become a troubling piece, concerned as it was with the twisted shapes of power, and it cast shadows in the garden, shadows that I couldn't escape in so short a time. I ended up acting out some of the tragic consequences of abuses of power as they play out across the stage of the natural world.

I started out as a blindfolded refugee carrying a suitcase precariously along the top of a high stone wall. Below me a line of white shirts hung along the wall with arms spread wide, with lines of red-painted string leading from each shirt's center to a sickle stabbed deep in the green lawn. I moved around the garden, naked, still blindfolded, pulling my suitcase on a cart. Over time, one by one, the white shirts were replaced by audience members standing in a line, backed against the wall as if awaiting a firing squad. I crawled through bushes & trees, planted artists’ paintbrushes into the ground so they looked like flowers, & set their bristles aflame. I made fires on stones & walls, blew mournful sounds with a hunting horn, made an altar & burned white shirts in a bowl.

For all that, the performance was a little too short and a little too fast paced for the themes involved, and the images of human suffering amidst natural beauty never quite developed the way I’d hoped. Some individual images were strong, and the gallerists liked my respectful use of natural materials (stone, water, fire) and the natural environment.

In front of Prior department store,
Pardubice, Czechoslovakia, 8/10/90

I'd been invited to Pardubice by Olda Basta and other members of the independent PANAG Arts organization. When I got there they tried to talk me into doing a performance in front of the Semtex factory main gates, to stop the 1300 employees from getting to their buses & tram cars and going home after a day's work. I demurred for several reasons and retreated to the safety of the auto-campground where PANAG had housed me (in a tent) along with a 20-person Italian anarchist collective from Torino consisting of a punk band "Panico," a performance group "CCC CNC NCN," several technicians and a couple of representatives of their publishing and distribution division "Nautilus."

One day the Italians and I went shopping at Prior, Pardubice's largest department store, looking for batteries and potential performance props. I was fascinated by the fact that shampoo sold inside Prior for 15 kcs. while at the same time six of the fifteen vendors with tables set up directly outside Prior's entrance were selling the exact same shampoo for... 15 kcs. I decided to address commercialism and the emergence of a market economy in my performance, and to perform in that same large plaza outside Prior, imitating the vendors and putting handwritten price signs on various useless items including Czech flags and Czech-flag-colored pompoms which were in proliferation, it being time for Czechoslovakia's first free national elections.

It hardly needs to be said, that by "addressing issues" I made a crap performance without any soul whatsoever.   The 400 or so Czechs who stopped shopping long enough to watch it were mostly just perplexed. But my new friends the Italians liked it, and I got some great pictures of this one.

Dobřany Psychiatric Hospital,
Dobřany, Czechoslovakia, 8/8/90

Psychiatric doctors Leoš Horák and Jíří Bláhovec see my Plzeň performance and ask me to perform the next day for the patients at Dobřany Psychiatric Hospital, where they both work. I agree on the condition that I am allowed to tour the facility beforehand. So the next morning friends from Plzeň and I drive to the hospital. After coffee with Jíří, Leoš and other doctors, they take me to their first proposed performance site, a small auditorium where the patients diagnosed as “sexual deviants” are throwing a disco party, which they do about once a month. There were about 70 patients, many of them dancing; the place was hopping. Most of the patients who are ambulatory and who allowed out of their wards attend even though the have to pay; apparently the sexual deviants throw a pretty good disco party. I wondered to myself how my performance could possibly top this.

I insisted on touring as much of the facility as possible. We spent hours going through most of the wards, dayrooms, dormitories, isolation cells etc. This hospital is the oldest and second largest in Czechoslovakia: 1500 patients, 20 doctors. Large early 19th-century buildings set in a vast fenced-in park, woods & gardens, long covered arcades, hedges, Baroque architecture straight out of Foucault.

Inside, the wards have ugly yellow walls and beige linoleum floors; they’re dingy and depressing in spite of lots of windows. Most wards consist of one large room with up to twenty metal & spring beds, with thin mattresses. Smoking is permitted only in the one bathroom, at a table and chairs only six feet from two toilet stalls with no doors. The large ashtrays are overflowing and clouds of smoke are everywhere.

After some discussion, we are allowed into the male sex-criminals' ward, with the door locked behind us. The men very tall and seem sinister at first as they quickly crowd around us in shabby hospital gowns. They ignore us strangers and speak very rapidly and insistently to Jíří and Leoš, asking them for help getting soap, cleaning materials and paint. Their bathroom is the most repulsively filthy one yet, with excrement staining the walls and floor, the toilets malfunctioning; the patients want to take care of their space, but have so far been denied the means. One patient says that he knows that he was sick when he was put here, but that three years in this small ward has made him really and truly crazy. In the corners of the room, there are very old men walking slowly in circles. Their eyes don't seem to see anything around them.

Escorting me around the hospital has given Jíří and Leoš the opportunity to speak with many patients whom they don't ordinarily see regularly. Jíří and Leoš have a reputation as caring, progressive doctors and the patients take advantage of our visit to ask for various forms of assistance. The administration and most of the staff is quite conservative and prefers drugs and incarceration to attempts at rehabilitation. Average length of stay is 20 years. Many are simply senile elders abandoned by families. One man is Sudeten German, here since 1945. Still speaks only German.

I am completely overwhelmed by my emotional response to the ward visits. I know there is no possibility of constructing a performance through my usual process; any attempt to quickly absorb, analyze and regurgitate this experience was bound to fail. Failure isn’t ever fun but neither is it normally something to particularly worry about; the possibility of failure is always present in this type of work. Here, however, failure could have different consequences. I had no idea how this audience would engage with my work. I didn't want to patronize, terrify or confuse them, or use their developmental challenges as a gratuitous inspiration or focus for the piece. At the same time, though, I couldn't ignore the situation which they and currently I found ourselves in: in a 19th-century insane asylum in Bohemia. I had to address this somehow; this was exactly what the piece was made for and to weasel out of that challenge would have been unconscionable, cowardly.

But I was nervous. If I couldn’t make some connection with this audience, if what I did ended up meaning nothing to them, I’d have been devastated. I thought that it would be very hard to keep on with the whole project.

I decided that the only thing I could was to trust myself completely. I put everything out of my mind and, having in fact decided to perform in the auditorium after the disco party finished, I simply crawled on hands and knees into the room in my street clothes, with no theme, unrehearsed, with my suitcase on my back and no plan at all.

When I got to the center of the room, I let the suitcase slide slowly off my back, opened it and manically threw my props and costumes willy-nilly around the room. I stripped to my underwear and stood in the middle of the room and waited until the objects on the floor told me what to do next.

This ended up being possibly the finest performance I've ever done, and certainly the most rewarding. From the very beginning I could tell that the patients were completely absorbed. Apart from the catatonics in the room, the patients exhibited none of the behavioral reserves of “normal” audiences. They laughed loudly. The hooted, hollered, shouted to me in words of course I couldn’t understand. At times they were so quiet they seemed to be breathing with me, their muscles seemed to tense and release when mine did and they seemed to be discovering the same "story" as the one I was discovering as the piece unfolded within and around me. In only two or three other instances have I ever come anywhere close to experiencing such generosity from an audience. They gave me far more than I gave them - and I gave them everything I had.

After I finished and exited the room, I felt extremely good, high & satisfied, as I cleaned up, came back in and sat down at a table near the front of the auditorium. As I sat there, many of the patients came up to me and asked questions, made comments. One man wondered if I had been "describing" a prison or a hospital. I asked what he thought. He said he thought it might be either one, or that maybe they were the same. We talked about prisons inside and prisons outside. A young man told he'd been having recurring hallucinations for seven years and I had just acted out some of them. I thought that was maybe the best thing I’d ever heard.

I was asked for my autograph - many times! Exchanged addresses with about four patients. Was given presents: patients ran back to their wards to get and give me Civic Forum buttons, a Virgin Mary medallion, paintings and drawings they had made. The disco party disc jockey, also a patient, a sexual deviant, asked me if they could play music again. I said of course. He dedicated the first song, their favorite, to me. Michael Jackson's "Beat It." Patients, doctors, my friends, we all soon ended up dancing for an hour to Czech rock and American disco music. It was an entirely new situation for everyone, and everyone was so generous with each other. I felt so close to people so quickly.

Then at some point Franta Stoček told me it was time; we needed to be going. I followed him outside the building and it suddenly hit me - here it was - here was the tragedy and the price of it all. I was leaving and most of these people couldn't. We’d danced together but we couldn't walk very far together. I barely made it through all the goodbyes and out through the gate before breaking down completely. Everyone went down the road to the village pub, while I walked through nearby fields, sobbing uncontrollably for half an hour before being able to join my friends.

Divadla Dialog, Plzeň, Czechoslovakia, 8/6/90

I had about an hour and a half to adapt Brief Amaze to this site, a small theater space in the basement of Plzeň's Cultural Center. For me, the central issue of the piece had always been about how power operated and expressed itself, in both personal and institutional ways. This venue provided my first real opportunity to take a crack at this issue. I tried to suggest a physical situation where judgement took place; I think I ended up with a kind of clandestine kangaroo courtroom. I reintroduced the table and the fight sequence, alternately enacted the roles of both judge and judged, and explicitly placed selected audience participants in complicity with the act of judgement. This performance most closely approximated how, while designing it in the U.S., I had imagined it would operate.  As such it was a solid, successful, necessary performance which has always seemed a bit dull in retrospect.

I had wanted to suggest political power without using clichéd or overly specific imagery. I'd read somewhere about Czech president Havel's reluctance to wear neckties, and for me this connected to the preposterous proliferation of (usually gratuitous or honorary) military service ribbons on the chests of Soviet ( or any) generals, so towards the end of this performance I tied seven or eight neckties around my neck. That the image had exactly the intended effect on the audience became clear in post-performance conversation with the audience; however, they all felt that they would have liked this image to occur sooner in the performance, to give them some sort of anchor during what for them was a storm of unfamiliar theatrical experience.

I was surprised by the audience's lack of familiarity with the kind of imagery I presented them. I'd extrapolated from my knowledge of Polish theatrical tradition and assumed that Czech theater was similarly experimental. In the case of this particular audience I was wrong; they all said they had never seen anything like this at all.

All performances of Brief Amaze included some sort of sequence where I brought four audience members into the "stage" area and in one way or another implicated them in the performance. I often had great luck in my choice of (usually previously unknown to me) participants. In this case I happened grabbed a couple of Plzeň's highest-level cultural and political leaders, which fit perfectly with the focus of the piece. 

This was my first real contact with eastern European audiences. After the performance I immediately went backstage to clean the paint off my head etc. Co-organizer Ivan Jachým came back to drag me out front so I could answers some questions from the audience. I expected a dozen or so people to be hanging about and was stunned to see that about 50 out of an audience of 60 had stayed and were continuing to give me their rapt attention. We ended up having a wide-ranging discussion which lasted over two hours. Certainly the audience's interest was due in large part to the fact that I was an American, but their questions were equally concerned with the techniques and intentions of the work itself. I was flattered, engaged and thrilled by this opportunity to respond to genuine interest in my work. Conversations like this one were the rule throughout eastern Europe, and it was difficult, on my eventual return to the west, to cope with the lack of interest expressed by western audiences.

raum f, Zürich, Switzerland, 8/2/90

I'd been invited to Zürich by Vänci Stirnemann, to perform in Fritz Vogl's photography gallery, raum f. This space was the first one that struck me powerfully enough to have a strong influence on the piece. I'd been interested for some time in the visual qualities of text written in white chalk on black surfaces, so when I saw raum f's beautiful scuffed black floor I abandoned all my preconceptions about my performance and began designing "from the ground up" as it were. Once Fritz had assured me that I could do anything I wanted to the space, I ran out and bought a huge box of chalk. I spent the early afternoon before the performance covering the floor with a semi-improvised text. I was in a bit of a hurry & wanted to make sure that I came up with enough material to entirely & evenly cover the floor, so I began by writing remembered lines from Heimlich Maneuvers, a poem/play/novel that I'd been working on for a couple of years. As I suspected, this quickly inspired new material & after about an hour or so I had produced what I thought was a gorgeous floor text which would be obliterated during the performance by my movements & those of the audience . I also hung most of my props by twine from the ceiling & then started devising a new sequence for the piece.

As became typical throughout my tour, I spent about an hour in the performance space working out the general 'theme' & devising a sequence especially for that space. This sequence was really just a rough shorthand outline of actions; the pacing & other specifics would be improvised. I'd often 'walk through' the sequences quickly as an aid to memory, but the performances were otherwise unrehearsed.

After completing my preparations, I read the text I'd written on the floor & realized that I liked the new material a lot and didn't want to lose it when the audience's feet erased itI didn't have the time to transcribe it before the performance, so I shot slides and months later transcribed from them, piecing the whole text together like a jigsaw puzzle.

Anchored by the text-covered floor & limited by my bruised-rib-imposed immobility (I did not, for instance, include the usual table and argument/fight sequence), the center of gravity of the piece was very low: most of my actions were done sitting, laying down or on my knees.

I was very happy with this piece. The installation I'd created to perform within was strong enough to stand on its own. The use of the Heimlich text allowed the reintroduction of the personal issues I'd dealt with at Southern Exposure, but in a much more abstracted & appropriate way. For me the piece was about the simultaneous pain of loss & liberation from emotional baggage. I was able to let go of the grief I'd been carrying about my lover leaving me, without being maudlin about it: the personal therapeutics aspects were subservient to the formal requirements of the piece, which is the way I wanted it. 

One aspect of the performance was kind of disastrous but very instructive. I'd added a sequence in which I re-painted my face with black paint on my hair & flesh-colored paint on my face & neck.  I thought this was hysterically funny, but when the audience didn't respond at all, I thought maybe I hadn't done this "makeup" accurately enough, so I started to add a black mustache. After I'd stroked it onto one side of my upper lip I immediately realized that I was making a mistake: the mustache was probably too close to being a caricature of a Hitler mustache. But having done one side I figured I was committed so I finished the other side too. Post-performance conversations confirmed my fears. Everyone thought I was doing Hitler and this immediately focused their reading of the piece into a very limited direction. They reevaluated everything they'd already seen, interpreting the piece as being about militarism, which it most decidedly had nothing to do with.  I was appalled, but I had learned that even the smallest mistakes can have huge implications.

This is the text that I wrote on the floor:

Heimlich on the train as it sways with itself in an intricate pavane, eyes closed as she rocks above him gently even in the last moment as in the first, arriving and arriving. The schoolgirls like blackbirds on a long rolling fence of bicycles, eyes closed and mouths open, they easily keep pace with the train. Heimlich opening his blank book and reading "... you open your eyes to another dreary room in a rented flat, another dreary morning spent in guarded conversation with yet another dreary lover whom you hold in contempt." Feeling himself lifted up, suspended, transitory, the train an internal mechanism, imaginary, transitory, moving through a space like the inverse of space, being able to see only one side at a time, never both at once, the illusion of dimension. The forest on one side moving closer and the woman on the other side moving away. Blackbirds rising from a field of wheat which no woman has ever seen, only men at that distance or because of that intent, working to plant something with their eyes closed, blackbirds rising and the schoolgirls giggling. Heimlich holds his empty suitcase in his hand and watches the malevolent schoolgirls cycling away furiously after the train. He climbs down from the station platform to wander through a wheat field, inadvertently scaring blackbirds into the air but keeping on, some below-ground orbit which pulls him along like a fire, smoking his pipe and telling her stories which he thinks are true enough at least, while she yawns and giggles at his feet like a dog (rabbits in the garden.) On his lap, on his penis, on his mustache, pulling the pipe from his mouth, pulling his body from his clothes (white underwear), pulling his penis out of history and into her vagina and walking away. At least this is how it seems to him, eyes closed, blank notebook, schoolgirls. The power of history or the history of power. On a blank page Heimlich writes "leaving-cleaving-one flesh" and "begins to cry" and begins to cry. But above him in the air, above the train, above the station platform, above a million men standing ankle-deep in clean white underwear, above the wheat fields and stairways, above one lone woman who walks (a bit more slowly than usual for her) carrying a nearly-empty suitcase, above the schoolgirls on their bicycles, above the blackbirds in flight, there is a sound which is not a sound at all, a sound like a bell which is just about to ring or like a bell just recently rung. Heimlich thinks he can hear a sound above all the other sounds. At least he thinks that such a sound could exist even without his complicity. He wonders what song she begins to sing as she ties her suitcase to a black bicycle and rides away across the field.

Performedia Festival
Piazza Municipio, Ponte Nossa, Italy, 7/29/90

Immediately after completion of Puppet Walk, I watched a performance by Logos Duo in the Municipal Building. As that ended, I slipped out to the adjacent piazza to get ready for my performance. When the audience arrived at the site, I began. The piece's sequence was almost exactly the same as the Beograd version: I was still relying on the inherent cohesion of the original gestural vocabulary and sequence, as I hadn't yet found compelling site-specific influences to incorporate into and reshape it. The piece actually did contain a short sequence of spoken English, but the content of this dialogue between the two sides of my face, each painted a different color, wasn't important. It merely served to key both the audience & me into a rapidly escalating argument between my two half-selves, an argument which suddenly turned physical when one half threw the other over backwards out of a chair and the twain wrestled on the ground until two previously-designated audience members pounded two brass judge's gavels on the ground.

I'd enlisted Gianni Bedolo and Giorgio Bulzi, two young Milanese conceptual artists, as gavel-pounders, explaining to them that they should let me wrestle with myself for about thirty seconds before halting that sequence.  Playful troublemakers that they are, they waited almost four minutes before halting me. The wrestling sequence is very vigorous & exhausting to begin with, & I had landed wrong when I fell from the chair, smashing my elbow between rib cage & concrete. I was in a lot of pain during the entire sequence & was sure I'd cracked at least one rib. As it turned out, I had just badly bruised three ribs, making it very difficult for me to walk, carry heavy objects or perform for about two weeks, all of which is exactly what I had to do. The piece was well-received & I felt it was stronger than the Beograd version, a feeling probably due to the fact that here I was performing for a more performance-friendly audience.

A blindfolded walk from Clusone to Ponte Nossa, Italy,
7.29.90

In addition to the Brief Amaze performances, I had planned on doing a performance called "Liberty Belt," dragging a large bell around public squares such as Moscow's Red Square, Berlin's Alexanderplatz & Prague's Vaclavske Namesti. When festival producer Emilio Morandi touted the festival as a bi-city one, I planned to drag a bell from one city (town actually) to the other. But the Ponte Nossa festival's interaction with Clusone was very limited & didn't seem worth delineating. I'd also not been able to find a bell, so I was going to abandon "Liberty Belt."  Emilio had, however, had already publicized this performance and insisted that I do it, so, instead of a bell I blindfolded myself & dragged a brick with the words IDEA, IDEOLOGY, IDEAL and IDENTITY printed on it. I simply walked from the central Plaza del'Horloge in Clusone seven kilometers downhill to Artestudio in Ponte Nossa, where I planned to remove the blindfold and smash the brick.

Traffic along the road between the two towns was very slow & heavy due to nearby bicycle & motocross races & returning vacationers, so I had a much larger % less mobile "audience" than I'd expected for an essentially private performance that turned into a minor media circus. I was followed the entire way by all the other festival artists, on foot and in cars, most carrying video and still cameras. Being blindfolded I missed a lot of amusing interaction between this group, police & passersby. The string attached to the brick frayed and broke a half-kilometer from Ponte Nossa, but a (non-festival participant) passerbye picked it up and followed me to my destination, returning it to me in time so I could smash it for my "grand finale."

The plaza in front of Milos Duric bookstore
Beograd, Yugoslavia, 7/21/90

Dobrica Kamperelic had arranged a space for me to perform at & had planned for my performance to be a collaboration with Ana Djordjevič, Déjan Markovič and himself. It was agreed that we four would collaborate but conceptual discussion of the nature of this collaboration never materialized & the specifics of the collaborative action were addressed only briefly on the day of the performance.

The performance took place in the public square between the Milos Duric bookstore and the American Cultural Centre. This square directly adjoined Beograd's version of the Champs Elysées, a twelve-block long pedestrian thoroughfare of the sort found in many European cities. The performance had been publicized through word of mouth & flyers that had been xeroxed, printed & posted the day before the performance. As the performance began, there were about twelve people from Dobrica's circle of friends in attendance, but it soon attracted the attention of shoppers & other strolling pedestrians, most of whom stayed until it was over. By the end of the performance an audience of about 250 had gathered.

To me the performance itself seemed pretty desultory.  I attempted to make some references to the act of traveling, but otherwise I felt it to be a kind of rote recitation of empty gestures, like an outline of my intentions rather than an involved expression of them. I was jet-lag exhausted & this was the first attempt, so I wasn't too surprised. The best part for me was that I had two hecklers during the performance, but the crowd's attentiveness quieted them quickly. It helped that I couldn't understand a Serbo-Croatian word of what the hecklers were saying.

Southern Exposure, San Francisco CA 6.29.90

Adapting the version of Brief Amaze (that I had premiered at The Lab several months earlier) for touring in Eastern Europe, I created an hour-long piece using "modules" of distinct gestural activities which I hoped would be individually evocative and which could be resequenced according to the specific conditions of each site where the piece would be performed. I didn't want to script a performance in advance and simply present it in, say, Poland, but I did want to prepare a vocabulary of gestures for myself to draw upon. I'm not a good improviser, but felt that if I had the bricks ahead of time I could improvise the building of houses of different shapes when I needed to.

The month before I left was one of acute stress. My lover ended her relationship with me, I was under financial pressures, was creating a performance and was of course preparing for a 3-month tour in unfamiliar territory. The Southern Exposure performance ended up confirming the piece's ability to articulate site- and situation-specific concerns, although strong personal/emotional content concerning my recently-ended relationship weakened the piece and diverted the audience's attention from broader concerns that I'd hoped to articulate. I also bowed to some sort of inner insecurity and added a short spoken monologue section which ended up not really serving any purpose.

A technical failure of this performance: I cut my arms with razor blades, not meaning to evoke emotional response but rather attempting to subsume this image within an iconography of images of pain. My technical mistake was not making it clear that I had in fact cut myself (actually more deeply than I'd intended.) My white shirt was already soaked with red paint and, since this obscured the flow of blood, everyone in the audience thought I had simply mimed the act of cutting my wrists, evoking a banal pathos that emotionalized what was meant to be a performance of purely formal gestures & that had a strong negative effect on the interpretation & credibility of the piece.

But I managed under a lot of stress to create a performance which didn't totally embarrass myself, so it seemed a good rehearsal for the European tour.

Justin Herman Plaza, San Francisco CA
2/27/90
Including nighttime films by Raegan Kelly.

I was commissioned by Intersection for the Arts, through their "Projects/Off-Site Spaces" program, to do a 16-hour performance / installation using the entire space of Justin Hermann Plaza, the large ceremonial intersection of Market Street with the Embarcadero which also serves as the eastern entranceway to the Hyatt Regency Hotel and the Embarcadero [shopping] Center. A statue in the plaza commemorates the claiming of this region for the Spanish monarchy.

One of the underlying and translucent conceits of this project, The Infant Carlos III Dreams of the New World, was that I would "re-enact" various processes of the original colonization: separation from home; travel; the exploration & mapping of the “discovered” site; the acquisition, construction, domestication, trade and, eventually, symbolic recapitulation (i.e. creation of culture). I intended to include such actions as lots & lots of walking, the moving around of various materials, building a wooden tent-like structure, and burning meat on a grill so as to produce smoke & stink.

Touted as a “public” space, the plaza actually fell within two separate but overlapping jurisdictions from which I needed approvals and permissions. The Embarcadero Center Management Corporation needed only my verbal assurances that I wouldn’t impede traffic or permanently alter any physical structure. The SF Park & Recreation Department, however, reviewed my proposal and balked at the shelter-building and cooking, as both were overtly against the plaza’s rules. The pleasant grassy peripheries of the plaza attracted a sizeable population of homeless people that Park & Rec tried to dissuade by aggressively enforcing the no cooking / no shelter-building rules; thus they wouldn’t approve my intended actions.

I explained that my “shelter” and my “cooking-fire” should be allowed because they were symbolic rather than functional. Dueling tends not to be allowed in parks either, but scripts of Romeo and Juliet are not censored for this reason. But Park & Rec wouldn’t be budged from their perspective that the functionality of these elements existed concurrently with their symbolic aspects, and that to let me do something that was forbidden for others to do would be hypocritical. 

As interesting and perfectly apt as this dialogue was, I didn't want these issues to sabotage the project as a whole. And since I was doing performance and not theater, for me not to admit that they had a point would have been pretty hypocritical. After several meetings we worked out a compromise in which I’d build a structure with only three walls and no real roof, i.e. one which didn’t really provide shelter.  And I didn’t press the cooking issue.

As it turned out, on the day of the performance I could have done anything I wanted, because no one really cared. 

The Lab, San Francisco CA 10/15/89

I had been trying since 1982 to create a hybrid performance style combining elements of text (Beckett, Language Poetry), theatre (Pina Bausch, Butoh) and performance art (Abramovic & Ulay, Joseph Beuys). As my attempts had so far proved unsatisfactory, at the beginning of 1989 I began to separate the textual and gestural components, to explore each apart from the other & concentrate more on the gestural, which was less familiar to me. I was very inspired by a performance of Shaun Caton's that I saw at Artist Television Access in summer 1989. Coincidentally, soon afterwards I was invited to perform in Moscow as part of a festival co-organized by The Lab. So I immediately began creating a wordless performance specifically for Eastern European audiences. This was the first version of the modular performance I took to Europe & Moscow eight months later.

From a private letter from Christine Tamblyn:

The beginning movement [of “Brief Amaze” at The Lab] with the glass reminded me of old guard conceptual art pieces (Marioni, Kos, etc.) but didn’t really seem derivative. One can be in a genre without being derivative.

I like the vulnerability in your work – also a part of the charisma – ritual sacrifice to the audience. Your nudity became animal-like in a way that was quite disturbing. I found myself wondering if male nudity was more taboo than female nudity….

The face-painting was effectively visceral, and worked as a great set-up for the dopplegänger duel. I’ve always liked the way details accrue increasing significance as the piece unfolds in your work. Not really an aspect of narrative but an aspect of symbology and compression – the details like magnets attracting stray filings of meaning. The doppelgänger image continued to articulate itself (language or no) and the wrestling, strangling, etc. was wonderful – pathetic and absurd all at once, a Beckett-like clowning.

There seemed to be a string of false endings – like a box with false bottoms. First the reconciliation with the audience, then the erasure as a coda and finally the return to the beginning with the glass. It was like you were exhausting every possible stratagem of culmination.

The Lab
San Francisco CA 5/20/88
Written by Scott MacLeod.
Produced, directed, and performed by Dede Puma and Scott MacLeod

Review by By Aaron Noble, Bloatstick, San Francisco CA 1988:

Necromancy is a carefully structured work set in ancient Egypt and modern suburbia, with stops at archaeological sites, lecture halls, and the psychiatrist's office. The play is made of variations on a single invasive intellectual act, committed in different eras and different roles by a man whose only character trait is his obsessive need to impose his own structures (like, it is implied, history and psychoanalysis) on buried objects and women. Early in the play the pith-helmeted MacLeod discusses the grandeur of his scientific achievements while walking like a giant over the Egyptian landscape. Arriving at the Sphinx, briefly incarnated by Puma (who later plays MacLeod's lover, assistant, patient, and the first female pharoah of Egypt), he nonchalantly straddles it.

This is the first metaphor of a play that runs on metaphor, not on plot or character development (the play cartwheels through time and space with panache to spare; nevertheless it's a still-life, as charming and ironic as a natural history diorama), and metaphor itself is shown to be masculine. It is the man's primary tool of seduction, manipulation and conquest. Throughout the play, sometimes as analyst, sometimes as husband, he says the same thing: "Let's play a game." His games are metaphors: "You be a station wagon and I'll be cub scouts." They put her into roles of his devising. She participates in kind (“I'll be a blackboard and you can spend all your time erasing me.") to please him, or because he won't communicate otherwise, or because she sees a chance to score, but even scoring a point is only scoring a point in his game.

What games she might like to play are forever out of his view, but we get glimpses: having briefly finagled an opportunity to speak outside of his structures, she assumes a mode of magic realism, surreal and without metaphor (the surrealists despised metaphor. Their startling juxtapositions were never a code for something "logical"): "the noise her shadow makes in the darkness is erotic." Her syntax is literal, no attempt is made to distance or qualify the fantastic. Parenthetically, I think these monologues, while important structurally, are the weakest part of the play. Big chunks of gooey poeticism, they lack the bite and memorability of MacLeod's dialogue. They also depict femaleness as essentially non-linear and cosmically attuned, something like the nineteenth century ideal of the noble savage. This makes the play a critique of sexism from a sexist perspective, so it's not surprising that MacLeod's portrait of a chauvinist is hilarious ("I'll be the husband and you shut up.") and sharply observed - his body language contributes as much as his repartee - or that the play offers no way out of the trap it depicts. Despite an equivalence of lines and stage time the play favors the male part and lays subtle traps for the woman, the biggest of which is that she doesn't initiate action and remains a perpetual victim, preserved in the calm atmosphere of eternity that is one of the production's accomplishments.

There is an acting coup when Puma starts repeating everything Macleod says. He treats it as a particularly stupid game while we are amazed to hear that her repetitions carry far more force and validity than his originals. It's an act of appropriation more direct and successful than any of his and it sends him into a rage.

Still, nothing changes. He never sees her but as he constructs her. In the play’s last, sad, line she vacates her body to accomodate his need to extend himself. "I'll be my pocket," she says, "and you be my hand."
 

This version of “Necromancy” was performed by me & Dede Puma at The Lab, San Francisco, May 19-21, 1988. An earlier version was performed by me & Michelle Soleau at the Student Union Art Gallery at SF State on October 7, 1982. Actually, the very very first version was performed by me & Amy Elliott as “The Mummy’s Curse” at Tattoo Rose on April 27, 1983. A couple of early versions of short excerpts were published as prose poems in Channel vol. 1 No. 6, San Francisco, by editor/publisher Sue Carlson in 1983, before this material had even been conceived of as part of a play.

Polyphonix 8 Festival
San Francisco Art Institute 11/9/84
New Performance Gallery
San Francisco 5/12/85
Created & performed with Jeanne Gallo

When Jean-Jacques Lebel & Jacqueline Cahen brought their Paris-based Polyphonix sound-poetry festival to NY MOMA, Ellen Zweig got an NEA grant to bring all the European artists to SF as well. She rounded up a crew of her students as associate producers: me, Marsha Vdovin, Amy Elliott & Andrea Dace. Among other duties, I was stage manager for one or two evenings. We put on a four night extravaganza with over a dozen performances a night by the likes of Carolee Schneeman, Armand Schwerner, Jerome Rothenberg, Jackson McLow, Ann Tardos, Larry Wendt, Eleanor Antin, Bernard Heidsick, Guilia Niccolai & scores more.

The sublime Greg Goodman played piano under a parachute. The monstrous genius Joel Hubaut frantically read from a book in English though he didn't understand the words, eating the pages as he read, till his cheeks were red & distended, bits of paper spitting out with every attempted syllable. I plagiarized this performance (poorly - though the German audience liked its "formal elements") at Der Festival Das Plagiats in Braunschweig, West Germany in 1988.

As the last act of a stressful, exhausting festival, Terry Allen played a couple of songs on piano, one of them about a herd of prairie dogs sucked up by a tornado and slammed into a tall shiny bank tower in Dallas or Houston. The last notes of the song were thunderous minor chords that broke my heart & snapped me in two. The Jack Daniels helped also. I started bawling like a baby, had to be carried to the car, driven home, fed, fucked & allowed to sleep for 22 hours.

The major perk for us student producers was being able to curate ourselves onto the same stage as these major figures. I was nervous, being still more or less a novice, so I sought out my pal Jeanne Gallo, a veteran of experimental theater work. We intuitively developed some core thematic elements through physical experimentation, until at some point I got inspired & banged out a short script in an hour or two. We honed the script & the gestural components & came up with a nifty seven-minute performance. I think this is still one of the best things I've done. We got on stage, did our thing, got off stage. When the lights blacked out after we'd finished, there wasn't a sound in the house for about 10 seconds, then someone exhaled a sincere "whew" that I still remember & feel to this day & that is really all the affirmation & reward I could ever ask for.

I think we made some minor changes to the piece for the New Performance Gallery gig, but I can't remember for sure. I think the part where she cut off my hair with scissors was a new thing.