Alexei Ratmansky, “Symphony #9,” 2012. From The Shostakovich Trilogy, 2013. Marcelo Gomes and Polina Semionova. Photo: Marty Sohl.

SOMETIMES A WHOLE THEATER leans forward and up, like a great set of hands is gathering the audience, and lifting. I don’t know anything else like it. The triumphant roar of the crowd at a baseball game comes close, but that surge is physical, whereas this is energetically felt, at once communal and deeply internal.

When such electricity sweeps through a big, storied house, it is amplified, given power and speed. This has been my experience at the New York State Theater (permit me, in this context, to not call it the David H. Koch Theater) during the three ballets Alexei Ratmansky has choreographed for New York City Ballet: Russian Seasons, Concerto DSCH, and Namouna, a Grand Divertissement.

The much in-demand Russian was meant to be in residence at that theater, a fit that seemed right in ways both artistic and historical. Reports vary as to whether Ratmansky was too busy elsewhere to truly commit to a residency offered him in 2008, or City Ballet management too inflexible to allow him enough freedom. He landed at Lincoln Center anyway: American Ballet Theatre, perennially happy to have its talent parachute in and out, snapped him up.

This is old history, but worth repeating. Architecture matters, as does the spirit of a place, and a company. The Metropolitan Opera House isn’t the State Theater (neither is the Koch), and ABT isn’t City Ballet.

Last weekend came ABT’s unveiling of Ratmansky’s Shostakovich Trilogy: “Symphony #9” from 2012 and two premieres, “Chamber Symphony” and “Piano Concerto #1.” I was practically static-y with excitement as I slid into my plush seat at the Met. The lights dimmed, the musicians readied, the starburst chandeliers slid up toward the massive ceiling. And then—

Dismay, and a rather bewildering enervation. That’s the funny thing about a big house; sometimes it doesn’t amplify, it annihilates. (That same night, a friend was downtown, watching Yvonne Meier at Abrons Arts Center: “As soon as I sat down I was exhausted,” she later reported of her experience at Abrons, which in scale and design could be the Met’s neglected walk-in closet.) By first intermission, when I saw a friend and much-respected colleague, I could only smile wanly at his excitement for a night he likened to City Ballet’s 1967 premiere of George Balanchine’s Jewels triptych.

There are many wonderful things about Ratmansky’s Shostakovich Trilogy. His movement invention remains singularly marvelous, so that these works are in deep conversation with their scores without being beholden to them. There is a complexity and ambiguity of meaning throughout much of the choreography; as is his wont, Ratmansky sets carefully drawn individuals against the rush of the crowd. When great gusts of dancers were swept on and off the stage, the women’s toe shoes hitting hard, I thought of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”:

Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

History and melancholy. The stage as darkling plain. How far away that plain is at the Met, how dwarfed by what surrounds it (and, at least as lit by Jennifer Tipton, how murky). Ratmansky’s art is not served by such a frame. Nor does he seem to make his most vibrant work within this expertly polished company of imported stars. It glitters, but does it live?

Sitting there on Friday, I also thought of something really dumb that another British writer, Kinglsey Amis, said in a 1975 interview: “And being American is, I think, a very difficult thing in art, because all the elements are European, and to give them a distinctive American stamp is something you can’t try to do—it can only be hoped that in the end this will emerge.”

So here’s something I was thinking that night, something that might also be really dumb: Being ABT seems to often be a very difficult thing, and maybe that is in part because so much of what it values in ballet centers around the art’s European trappings. Disorientation writ large: American Ballet Theatre, the Yankee declaration and Brit spelling slammed together.

I dunno. Maybe that’s a reach. Maybe what I should instead say is that I am still in mourning over Ratmansky not having ended up at City Ballet, and that while his works for ABT have been consistently solid and occasionally terrific, they have still never generated the same charge as have his works for City Ballet—a company that never laid claim on an entire country, just a metropolis, and all of the impatient, corner-cutting speed that went with it.

Justin Peck, In Creases, 2012. Robert Fairchild. Photo: Paul Kolnik.

Which brings us to Justin Peck.

That next afternoon I was back at Lincoln Center, across the plaza this time, to see City Ballet perform In Creases, the earliest of the three ballets Peck has made for the company.

Peck is a native Californian, still in his mid-twenties and still a dancer (City Ballet recently promoted him to soloist). He has talked about the adrenaline rush of New York, what that does for an artist, and also what it means to be rooted in one theater, one company. He has not yet gone into production hyperdrive, saying yes to one marquee commission after another. Though one imagines this is coming, just as it did for Ratmansky and, before him, Christopher Wheeldon—once the ballet world smells choreographic talent, it latches on for dear life.

And boy is Peck talented. For my money, he’s the most galvanizing voice in ballet right now. After the show the principal dancer Adrian Danchig-Waring texted me: “I’m grateful he’s working here.” I feel just the same.

Saturday’s sleepy weekend matinee began in a living history: Balanchine’s great opening statement in America, the 1935 work Serenade. Peck is in conversation with it, and with so much of City Ballet’s history (including, in a big way, Ratmansky). Replies tumble out of him in steps and phrases and even costumes.

You could feel the energy building as soon as In Creases began, its eight dancers plunging into the relentless first and third movements from Philip Glass’s Four Movements for Two Pianos. There were the pianos, hovering upstage center like sleek conjoined machines. The hands reached for us, and we were caught.

All of this isn’t to say Peck is a better choreographer than Ratmansky (which is anyway the stupidest sort of reasoning). It’s that there is something about the moment he’s in, time and place, and the fact that his dancers are all in, in a way that the seasoned pros across the plaza didn’t seem to be on Friday night. I don’t mean this as a criticism of Ratmansky; it’s more to say that Peck is working with his (often very young) colleagues, his peers, and he is in a different sort of exchange with them. That won’t last. How could it? But for now, it seems pretty special, so that, even when the ballets themselves aren't working in places, there is that larger sense of the thing itself working.

And maybe I am only projecting, creating my own sort of romance around a contemporary moment. (It’s a small romance, compared to how people talk of what it meant to see new Balanchine works unveiled—but then, isn’t such diminishment the story of this long last century?) I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. Or escapable. The forces at work when people call sports radio shows at two in the morning, half out of their minds for players and teams—well. Why should it be any different in the theater?

— Claudia La Rocco

Left: Artists Babette Mangolte, Charles Atlas, and Molly Davies with Ain Gordon at the Danspace Gala. (Photo: Ian Douglas) Right: Artist Ishmael Houston-Jones with Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton of DANCENOISE at the Danspace Gala. (Photo: David Velasco)

SPRING IS HIGH GALA SEASON IN NEW YORK. So many parties, so many drinks, so many conversations, so many of them about money. Getting it, giving it, never having enough of it.

This quote just about sums it up: “I want you to look at this art and think about need.”

That’s Ain Gordon, the writer, director, and actor, speaking at the Danspace Project gala, which he was emceeing. The art in question was static art, to be auctioned off in support of the theater. Among the works was a Marina Abramović portrait: “You could sell it tomorrow, let’s think clearly people,” a naked Lucy Sexton, fresh off a DANCENOISE routine later that evening, advised reluctant bidders.

But Gordon could just as easily have been talking about the moving art. There is, you may have heard, a long-standing gentleman’s agreement in dance, in which the artists, the people with the very least amount of money, subsidize most everything else, including those systems which purportedly exist to serve them. Yeah, there are lots of variations on this agreement in our world—but I often think its purest expression can be found in dance.

Well. Here’s another quote, from Merce Cunningham, which you also probably know, it having long since passed into Monet water lily territory:

“You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls.”

Left: Dylan Crossman and Melissa Toogood in Pam Tanowitz's The Specators, 2013. (Photo: Elyssa Goodman) Right: Michael Mahalchick at NADA. (Photo: Allese Thomson)

I have been thinking about this quote a lot these past few weeks. I thought about it when I was at the NADA fair, watching dancers perform outside (specifically out back), in the heat, on the pavement, for a meager audience—mostly unintentional and only vaguely interested. There was a Kickstarter campaign by organizers Cafe Dancer and Sam Gordon, announced in the press release, so the performers would receive more than “exposure.” I checked out the page (which features a photo of the empty asphalt performance area) just now; ten backers, $311 pledged of $2,500 goal, 0 seconds to go. Funding Unsuccessful.

I thought about the Cunningham quote again during the Movement Research gala, when the choreographer Ralph Lemon, in his tribute to the veteran arts advocate Sam Miller, talked about Miller having done his work “with such a brilliant, beautiful denial—that someday the boulder is not going to fall down.” And while watching young dance artists working as gala waitstaff. (And by working I mean something rather murkier—as one choreographer said to me of his behind-the-scenes efforts: “This is my ticket into the show.”) And when Jennifer Lacey deployed the gorgeous precision instrument that is her body, while the vocalist Megan Schubert offered a string of sentences: “The meaning that I do is a doing.” “The only thing that upsets me now is narrative.”

And the narrative is always the same, isn’t it? The curator Cathy Edwards, another honoree that night, talked of “the time when, if you were willing to be paid nothing and work hard, you too could be the managing director of Movement Research.” Is it not still that time?

I went to New York Live Arts last week to see The Spectators, Pam Tanowitz’s austere and ravishing new dance. What even to say about the relief of encountering art like this? And of spending time in the company of a dancer like Melissa Toogood. Speed, attack, amplitude, depth—she makes the business of being alive seem possible.

Left: The afterparty for the Movement Research Gala. (Photo: David Velasco) Right: Jennifer Lacey at the Movement Research Gala. (Photo: Ian Douglas)

“What is meant is not license, but freedom…” That’s another thing Cunningham said. I found it while trolling about for the unsteady souls bit. One of the other dancers in The Spectators is a guy named Pierre Guilbault, who recently told me he has figured out how to survive on $1000 a month, including a room he rents for $300 in Jersey City. He’s young, a beautifully buoyant and promising performer, and I wonder if his budget allows for classes, physical therapy, or health insurance. How long will $1000 a month work for him? What happens when it doesn’t anymore?

It’s all hopelessly romantic, in a desperate and cynical way—if there’s no money now, and there was never any money then and there’s not gonna be any money anytime ever, then what? Everything just for love? The margins hold the page.

Gala season. Maybe it’s best to end with a few nuggets of wisdom from Karen Finley at the New Museum, offered during a self-help workshop for artists in need of money, part of the “NEA 4 in Residence” show:

“When I lost my funding—and I have lost funding, some of you may be aware, you can Google me later—I thought I had lost everything.”

“Artists—they’re even more wonderful when they’re dead.”

“Right now. This is it, ok?”

“There’s no problem. There’s no problem. Everything’s fine.”

— Claudia La Rocco

View of Ragnar Kjartansson's installation at Hotel Holt.

“THE PROBLEM WITH SCIENCE is all facts are manipulated.”

The woman was talking to her friend in Kaffismiðja Íslands, a small, homespun café in Reykjavik. Good lattes and buttery croissants. The woman was Scottish, I think. Let’s just say definitely, and she was making a point about Margaret Thatcher—speaking ill of the dead, though respectfully, if one can be said to speak ill of the dead respectfully.

The problem with science is the pleasure with art.

This year’s Sequences VI, a “real-time art festival,” was ten days long, a day for every year that Gretar Reynisson, the festival’s honorary artist, spent making his durational collection “Decade.” I spent five of those days at the festival, wandering, mostly alone, through the quiet streets of a city with only about 120,000 inhabitants. Most places you look there is the chalky white of the mountains or the midnight blue of the ocean—there aren’t so many trees, and the ones that do exist are surprisingly delicate, in that northern stunted way. (What do you do if you’re lost in the forest? asks the Icelandic joke. Stand up.)

Reynisson’s “Decade” began January 1, 2001, and ended December 31, 2010. During this time he worked toward no exhibitions, but rather collected the material and detritus of the everyday: pillows, drinking glasses, white dress shirts. “Some people call this an obsession, but nevertheless…” the artist explains in a slender catalog. “I like creating rules.”

It’s a romantic idea, at once egomaniacal and Sisyphean: ten years to assemble something that most people will wander through in well under ten minutes. But then, Sequences VI is a romantic festival. “I was very much thirsty for a new approach, something non-academic,” said its curator, Markús Þór Andrésson. I think he was after something thoughtful and theatrical, a festival that wears its heart on its sleeve, only the sleeve is removable. “If we can all just accept this old-fashioned idea of theater, of doing something fake, then something true can happen as well.

View of Gretar Reynisson's “Decade.”

And let’s face it, Iceland is a romantic place, at least for a visitor. True, the locals are worn out with reading foreign press accounts of their remote island utopia. But what are writers without our lazy framing devices? The impulse behind this one is immensely understandable: When you’re on a chunk of volcanic rock in the middle of the Atlantic, slipping from gallery to geothermic hot spring to bar and back again, you’re maybe in the mood to be seduced.

Here’s one hopelessly romantic item: Hotel Holt, where most of the Sequences guests seemed to be staying, houses the largest privately owned art collection in Iceland. None of the usual horrific hotel wall decorations—the place is packed with quality works, and in fact it’s the closest thing the city has to a permanent public display, since the museum doesn’t have one.

“Growing up in Iceland, you never see the art object, you never see art history,” said Ragnar Kjartansson, who these days is working pretty much everywhere. “It’s very hard, if you grow up in this environment, to understand art as an object. It’s also quite good; there’s no burden of history.”

But of course there’s always history. Kjartansson’s contribution to Sequences is a set of small self-portraits, the lone figure rather ghostly amid the Easter Egg colors of the room—a room in Hotel Holt, where Kjartansson checked in, ordered room service, and settled in to paint. “Holt was the temple, the only place to see real art,” he said. “So this was a total homage.”

For the duration of the festival, at least, Kjartansson is in the temple, his paintings tucked amid the modernist abstractions and rugged seascapes that contemporary artists are now saddled with. “You can’t show beautiful landscapes and be serious about it, not here,” said Ragnheiður Gestsdóttir, whose quiet installation at the Reykjavik Sculpture Association manipulates the facts of landscape by placing a little cutout man in the center of an image of a natural amphitheater—ground zero for the shifting tectonic plates of Europe and North America, and also where Iceland’s parliament used to meet, back when they were Vikings. He’s holding it all together; she’s having her cake and eating it too. History.

Several other rooms at Hotel Holt had been taken over by Sequences, including Room 206, where Hans Rosenström’s sound piece “Blindsight” was holed up, waiting to whisper, in Icelandic, to an audience of one. Who knows what the neighboring guests made of the traffic in and out at all hours. With any luck, Holt will get a reputation for being one of those hotels.

A work by Magnús Logi Kristinsson.

On Saturday night, Holt was overflowing, playing host to an evening of Sequences performance art. The thing with site-specific shows, you have to be a nimble audience member or you’re stuck staring at the backs of taller people’s heads. I kept returning to a durational piece by Magnús Logi Kristinsson, which at first blush struck me as eye-rollingly tedious. Great. Another artist in a box; if I’d wanted this I’d have stayed home and gawked at Tilda.

Only you couldn’t gawk here, you could only see Kristinsson’s left leg and right arm, both extended from the white rectangular box. Someone untied his black dress shoe; someone retied it. People took photographs and giggled, etc. As the veins in his hand began to bulge, my jaded mood shifted. The things people do! I gave his anonymous arm a quick massage, feeling shy and bold at the same time.

This was shortly after, or maybe before, critic Oliver Basciano said to me: “You feel like a cynical bastard. But then that’s our job.” We both held drinks, as I remember. We both laughed. He was talking about his experience of watching Guido van der Werve’s film nummer veertien, home at artist-run space Kling & Bang Gallery, which weaves together the everyday business of living with the idea of the epic quest: Van der Werve traveled, triathlon-style, from Frédéric Chopin’s birthplace in Warsaw to his grave in Paris, his own personal campaign to keep going.

Basciano was talking, I think, about having to write what exists beyond the pleasing surface. Not to be romanced. I understand what he means, and also I’m not so sure. Is it possible to fail through resistance? “This whole horrible period of postmodernism has created this line,” Andrésson had said earlier, with a weary laugh. “Everything must be taken with a distance, with skepticism. It’s very difficult to unlearn this, when a whole generation of artists and audiences has been through this.”

One of the sections in van der Werve’s film is titled “Please Be Safe.” On Monday, amid news of the bombings in Boston, I remembered that he had been planning to run the marathon. I was happy to hear that he made it through ok.

— Claudia La Rocco

Sequences VI ran April 5 to 14, 2013 in Reykjavik.

Joanna Malinowska and Christian Tomaszewski, Mother Earth Sister Moon, 2009. Performance view, Zachęta Gallery, Warsaw, April 5, 2013.

THE LAST TIME I saw New York–based Polish artists Joanna Malinowska and Christian Tomaszewski was at a party in Brooklyn. The guests were asked to set their inhibitions aside and howl together like a pack of wolves (or was it coyotes?) in preparation for a participatory group performance Malinowska was staging as part of her contribution to the 2012 Whitney Biennial.

Nothing quite so taxing, or invigorating, was required of the elegant crowd gathered around the giant Tyvek spacesuit for the opening earlier this month of Mother Earth Sister Moon at the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw. The spacesuit was a dubious homage to the first woman in space, the Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, by way of Niki de Saint Phalle’s iconic 1966 hon-en katedral (she-a cathedral) sculpture made with Jean Tinguely. The only beast in our midst, on this occasion, was a man dressed up as a Siberian bear, an allusion to the never fully elucidated Tunguska blast of 1909, which frequently crops up in sci-fi novels and films from the Soviet era.

A collaboration between the two artists, the installation-cum–fashion show was conceived for Performa 09, and subsequently included in the 2010 “Star City: The Future Under Communism” group exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary. Shown for the first time in Poland, as a curious addendum to “The Splendour of Textiles” exhibition curated by Michał Jachuła, Mother Earth Sister Moon looked and sounded different in its third and final iteration. For one thing, the supine figure had been dismembered—a gloved hand here, a severed leg there, a large red liver hovering above us in midair like a remnant from some explosion.

Whereas on previous outings the fashion show took place inside the spacesuit, with the audience huddled round, at Zachęta a makeshift scaffolding accessed through two side staircases served as an aerial runway for models (and the bear) to parade on above the discarded suit, before descending into it and reemerging through a narrow vaginal slit between the figure’s amputated leg. Unlike in New York and Nottingham, where volunteers of all ages, sizes, and ethnic-origin had participated, the models this time came from an agency, which accounted for the greater uniformity in their appearance. Sporting futuristic hairdos with add-on fringes, courtesy of “avant-garde” celebrity stylist Jaga Hupało, they wore an impassive, droid-like expression that kept with the sci-fi theme of the show.

More or less flattering and outrageous, the thirty-seven costumes come in a subdued palette of black, white, grey, and washed-out colors meant to evoke an archival photograph. (Reproductions of film and cultural magazines from the 1960s and ’70s, their covers collaged and altered by Tomaszewski, were mounted on the walls.) The outfits draw inspiration from a variety of sources, from period filmic and literary materials to costumes worn by indigenous people of Siberia (the Evenks and the Tungusi) that Malinowska and Tomaszewski came across while traveling in the region. They reference avant-garde trends and communist pop culture alike, from Krzysztof Wodiczko’s The Personal Instrument, performed on the streets of Warsaw in 1969, to the Relkas boots popular in the ’80s.

Details such as these would no doubt have been lost on a non-native audience. The same goes for the eerie, composite musical accompaniment to the show. Besides bits of the original soundtrack composed and mixed live by Masami Tomihisa in New York, it featured strains of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata as well as liberal doses of alternative ’80s Polish rock bands, Pancerne Rowery chief amongst them, which elsewhere might have fallen on deaf ears.

— Agnieszka Gratza

The installation of Mother Earth Sister Moon is on view through May 19, 2013 at Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw.

David Hallberg in the wings during the first act of The Sleeping Beauty at a dress rehearsal at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. Photo: Sergei L. Loiko/Los Angeles Times.

Critic and poet Claudia La Rocco recently chatted with the celebrated American Ballet Theatre and Bolshoi Ballet dancer David Hallberg in Chelsea. They talked about his dual lives in New York and Moscow, what it means to be an intellectually curious ballet dancer in 2013, and his long self-education in contemporary art, including a for-now shelved collaboration with the French choreographer Jérôme Bel.

Claudia La Rocco: When did you start seeing contemporary dance, and what got you interested?

David Hallberg: It started when I was at Paris Opera School in 2000. I saw the company perform whenever they were doing programs, which was almost every weekend. I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t know Mats Ek, I didn’t know Jiří Kylián. I only knew of William Forsythe because of his In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated and the dancer Sylvie Guillem.

CLR: You were a baby then, right?

DH: I was seventeen, but I had this insatiable curiosity for what they were presenting. It’s not like I researched anything, even after I saw it. I didn’t know who they were or what they had created or where they were from. I just watched and watched and watched. And then I came to New York and I was very much engrossed in the ballet world.

CLR: You did the Intensive at ABT and then joined the Studio Company immediately after?

DH: Studio Company, and then the Main Company. At the same time, I began to go to the Joyce Theater and Dance Theater Workshop [now New York Live Arts], and then my tastes started to form. It was never a sense of, “I should see this; this will make me a more well-rounded artist.” As the years went on, I saw more contemporary stuff than ballet. It was a gradual process.

Sylvie Guillem in an excerpt from William Forsythe’s In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated, 1987.

CLR: My background is in poetry and visual art; I got thrown into writing about dance. I remember seeing one of Ann Liv Young’s early pieces. They were inserting these poor turtles into their vaginal cavities—

DH: As one does.

CLR: As one does. It’s the counterpart to the gerbil, right?

DH: [laughs] Totally.

CL: And I thought, “I don’t know what to think of this. This is interesting.” I was really bored with ballet until I started seeing works like Agon and realized ballet can be just as conceptual and philosophical as anything else. I realized it was similar to my taste in literature.

DH: What’s your taste in literature?

CLR: Poetry is a big part of it. The non-narrative structure of poetry is similar to how dance resists linearity. It’s more about structure, about rhythm and pacing. When I began to watch dance and was told things like “Paul Taylor is the greatest living choreographer,” I figured I must not like dance. Once I started to see other things I realized, “Oh, I was just in the wrong theater.”

DH: That’s kind of how my taste evolved as well. There are choreographers that are not my taste. I look at work sometimes and think, how is this valid in my world?

Often, when others are creating works in a ballet idiom, it seems like they go on autopilot: “Give me some Forsythe, give me some Balanchine.” Where is your own voice—question it! That’s why I’m curious about people who have the freedom, apart from any idiom that they’ve been tied to since they were kids, to create what their inner self is trying to say. That’s why I’ve gravitated to all of these modern things—some are really great, some are total crap, some you leave at intermission, some you leave crying. It’s exhilarating.

Left: Cover of Cynthia Carr's Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz. Right: David Wojnarowicz. Photo: Tom Rauffenbart.

Critic and writer Claudia La Rocco recently caught up with the pioneering performance art journalist Cynthia Carr in SoHo. They talked about her latest book, Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz (Bloomsbury, 2012), and her time spent writing for the Village Voice during a period that spanned the culture wars, the AIDS crisis, and the fabled East Village art scene.

Claudia La Rocco: So many things changed for me as a writer when I found you and Jill Johnston; your books were incredible guides to me. Was there anyone like that for you?

Cynthia Carr: Well, Jill Johnston definitely. But there weren’t many books available then. I did have The Art of Performance, edited by Gregory Battcock and Robert Nickas, and I had Queer Theatre by Stefan Brecht. I loved reading his descriptions of Jack Smith and The Ridiculous Theater, Hot Peaches. I felt that those people were big influences on East Village performance. But I was very much self-educated in terms of writing about performance art. I never took an art history class. And at that point, of course, performance was not even taught in colleges.

CLR: What did you study?

CC: I started in journalism at the University of Iowa, until they redid the whole program so it was sort of based on what I later realized was semiotics. I didn’t want to have a journalism program based on semiotics! It just seemed so foolish. I wanted to write stories. I switched my major to English and got into the Iowa Writer’s workshop as an undergraduate in fiction. I saw performance art for the first time in Iowa City, Iowa of all places. I remember sitting around in a circle while some performer came in and ran at such high speed that he was running up on the walls. I can’t remember anything else that happened in the show but I remember that.

CLR: What year was this?

CC: That would have been around 1970. Then when I moved to Chicago after college I started subscribing to the Village Voice so I could read about artists like Meredith Monk, Mabou Mines, and Richard Foreman. Jill Johnston had moved into her Lesbian Nation phase but I loved that too. When I started writing about performance myself, I was going to WOW in the East Village about every week. I had just started at the Voice as an art director.

I used to go to, say, the Pyramid Club or 8BC or Chandelier. I would take my cassette tape recorder in my purse and attach the microphone to the strap. I would take profuse notes, and then I would go home and transcribe the entire tape; I have a notebook filled with these transcriptions and drawings of the costumes and everything. It’s about an inch thick, typed single-spaced on both sides. I was trying to teach myself how to really observe. A lot of the performances were absolutely terrible. But there they all are in my notebook. It was a way get to know the club scene as well, which is what I was going to cover in my column. (It was actually at the end of the scene, which was so short.) The first thing I covered was in 1985, this Ethyl Eichelberger piece at 8BC. I just thought this stuff ought to be covered and no one was going. The theater critics didn’t want to go.

Karen Finley performing “I'm an Ass Man” at the Limelight in New York City.

Someone had reviewed a Karen Finley piece and really ripped it, I remember. I have to say that when I started watching performers like Karen Finley and Dancenoise and so on, it was like nothing I’d ever seen or heard of and I really questioned myself. “Why do I like this?” But I knew there was something there that was just so gripping to me. When I saw those early Karen Finley shows, I would get goosebumps. I think with performance, you have to pay attention to that, about how your body is reacting. Are you revolted? Are you ecstatic? Are you bored? Then the hard question—why? I watched this stuff for a long time before I started writing about it. I remember seeing a really great Dancenoise piece at Franklin Furnace, which was one of the only places in the art world that would allow this sort of thing—I mean a show that ends with a floor covered in slime and fake blood on the walls. I thought, “Am I wrong to love this?” There was no context for it. I tried to watch more and more of it and then develop an idea about it and when I did a cover story on Karen Finley in 1986, I got such a reactionary response. I had never seen anything like it. I don’t think anyone on the Voice staff had either. The Men’s Room was covered with graffiti about Karen. People had brought in cans of yams that were sitting on desks. I went in that day just thinking I was going to get some copies of the paper. As I was walking in the door, a senior editor was walking out. He said to me, “I just want you to know that I like the piece but I can’t say so publicly.” And I thought, “What?” I walk in and there’s this electric current of people arguing.