Saucy Cockteau and Holden Cox.

Wednesday , February 23 5:30 pm.

I’m calling this piece, The Moon is in my Mouth. In this performance I walked from Foster to Pratt along Clark street, rolling 16 yogurt covered almonds around in my mouth until I deposited them in spaces that wanted a little moon.

I used only my mouth to place the sweets, so I could be seen crouching on the ground with my face on a grate, or aiming my lips into that fire hydrant, or using my tongue to push a little moon underneath the toe of Abraham Lincoln as a Child.

The air was cold enough that each little moon steamed for a while in its place.

Perhaps some weary traveler along my path will be glad to find a healthy snack.

Monday, February 21 4:30 pm. Fulfillment of performance request: Sing Red Apple Juice riding south on the Red Line.

Sunday, February 20 7:00 pm. Our favorite feminist sex store, Early to Bed, 5232 N. Sheridan, opens its doors to "The Finger," hosted by Nomy Lamm and Anna Jae. The Finger is an all-gendr queer open myke and variety show. The show was alternatingly funny and sexy and nerdy and angry. Featured performers were the band "Chicago Boys' Choir." I performed F&F, a longer monologue.

It wasn't very long ago
You said that you would like to share my road
Then you started singin' my song
You said so many nights are waiting
Let's not spend a moment wasting time
'Cause we have very far to go
I will go if you will take me
I have never had a lover
I am young
But I am so alone

-Jim Croce, "A Long Time Ago"

Friday, February 18 Performance assignment from Katherine: make a a list of some of the week’s errands and activities. I was to incorporate either a number, a color, or a sign of the zodiac into each item described. And I was to perform it on her home voice mail using either a Russian or an English accent (I chose English). The list was as poetic as I could make it, and the first line was:

Six sculptural tartlets.

Tuesday, February 15 7:30 am. Early morning poetry reading to kick off Sarah Jackson's 30s. The poetry of Mary Oliver reminds me that life is good, so I read The Chance to Love Everything, The Journey, and Wild Geese.

(Left: Eric Silverberg & Sarah Jackson)

Saturday , February 12 10:00 pm. "Coming Out Against Cancer," the annual benefit for the Lesbian Community Cancer Project, at the South Shore Cultural Center. The event we call the "lesbian prom" was a great site for a four-person structured improvisation in two parts: (Left: Nicole & Rachel)

1) Individually or together, whenever anyone said the word "Fabulous," immediately look up at the ceiling for a count of 10.

2) When one of the DJs played "Brick House," (a safe bet), we gathered together to form a house with our bodies and tell each other one thing about the first home we ever lived in.

Friday, February 11 7:00 pm. Big Smith performed our last gig as Big Smith* for Amnesty International OUTfront and the Jamaican Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays (J-FLAG). The Program is Breaking the Cycle of Homophobia in Jamaica. The Charles Hayes Family Investment Center, 4859 S Wabash.

*Bring on the name change: Sassbox.

Thursday, February 10 5:30 pm. Performance at the law offices of Byrne, Wallin, & Fors. Here's how they set it up:

"Are you familiar with the space? Think double-wide trailer. Not a lot of room for rolling and diving and you might want to keep bodily fluids and indelible vegetable dyes to a minimum (carpet, you know). We have a copy machine, a water cooler, and sometimes a beautiful old dog named Hazel."

The piece I did was called It Hurts More to Break a Leg, which is the next iteration of the combination of water, oscillating fan, disappearing text on chalkboard, and participants on the phone to elders. Leslie called her mom and the first thing they talked about was whether or not Mom had signed a "Do Not Resuscitate" order as part of her living will.

Atalee Judy: Photo by Carl Wiedemann

Monday, February 7 8:30 pm, Links Hall. Performance for the assembling audience of Breakbone Danceco's Movie Night. Continued work on images & gestures inspired by indi's assignment (see Feb 3). The performance of writing in water with a swab on the classroom chalkboard in Freshman Seminar was very satisfying a few weeks ago. So I brought my own chalkboard to Links so I could write some more in water, and then watch it fade away. I also wanted to hear some of Annie Dillard's text read aloud so I brought some excerpts and invited people to read. Rachel moved through the crowd doing private readings that I didn't hear. The chalkboard text evaporated again and again.

Get Tickets to Breakbone's next show NOW.

Sunday, February 6 2-10:30pm. Phone performance at my house of karen's assignment (left).

The biggest danger in doing this year of performances is not encountering cops: it's pissing off my friends or wearing out their indulgence. Performance #37 may have done some damage.

A little background: I am a member of the 5-person End of the Ladder ensemble of Insight Arts. Over the summer we created a piece called Lies will Flow from my Lips (photo of karen & me left) and performed it in Portland at the Community Strategic Training Initiative. We continue work on the piece via email dialogue because our members are not all in Chicago. Our most recent assignment was to read Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and answer two questions about the text:

1) How does realizing that this text was originally a speech (a performance) affect your reading of it? Does it affect the way you think about the ideas? and 2) Why do you think Woolf chose such a unique structure to discuss her given topic of "women and fiction?"

I have fallen behind in my e-mail correspondencce with the ensemble & finally someone put her foot down and turned it into a performance assignment.

What happened:

I wrote my answers and e-mailed them to the ensemble. Call #1 came in around 2:00 pm. I got through about 75% of the text (4 minutes) including frequent interruptions asking for explanation (which I answered in Russian) before caller #1 hung up.

Call #2 came in around 3:30. She noted that I was out of breath (I had not yet learned to keep both the phone and the text near me). Caller #2 asked me a question right away and instead of answering I started reading my text. I felt very anxious about ignoring her question but I finished reading the whole text. She laughed at some points in the reading and was very patient.

When I was done I thanked her. She said, "I almost interruped you to say something about the pretense of academia...like those papers people read at IDKE, but then I got interested. I never read A Room of One's Own but I did read Orlando. When I was in high school I got into the romance of reading books. I would ride my bike out along the water and then back to some hidden spot behind a field or forest and read. I thought it was romantic but of course sometimes the grass would be itchy or there would be a stone under my butt. I read a lot of E.E. Cummings and Emily Dickinson or old limericks." Caller #2 then proceeded to recite from memory poems that began 1) you may not be the fairest star... 2) I died for beauty but was scarce... 3) Because I could not stop for death... Caller #2 requested an e-mail version of the text.

Caller #1's second call (6:45) was the most anxiety producing because she insisted on interrupting me constantly and begging me to stop and I could tell that she was getting angry. She tried to figure out the magic word that would get me to stop. She tried to get me to explain it in Spanish instead of Russian. I kept motoring through because I was so close to the end and if she would just let me finish I could explain the whole thing to her. It seemed that the possibility that there may be an end had never occured to her...she was convinced I would keep going all night. She hung up after 2 minutes.

Caller #1 called a third time, asked if it was still going, and when I picked up where I had left off she hung up immediately (22 seconds).

There was no rule that said I couldn't call people, just that I couldn't explain what I was doing. So in an attempt to soothe, I returned a call to caller #1. This was her reaction:

"I’m sure you're doing something grand and wonderful, but on the receiving end it’s irritating. It’s incredibly distasteful. I’m sure whatever you’re exploring is yielding interesting things, and I look forward to when you can talk to me about it but I just don’t appreciate it at all. It’s not something I want to engage with right now. I respect that you’re an artist. I wanted to see how you were and check in with you. There’s nothing on your web site indicating anything for today. Whatever the mystery is I hope you’re enjoying it because on the receiving end it’s not very enjoyable. I assume I’ll be able to talk to you about it tomorrow, I guess we’ll do that tomorrow."

Caller #3 was a woman from LifeSource who called to ask me to donate blood. She listened to 5 paragraphs of the text (3 minutes) before she hung up. After the first paragraph she said, "What the heck?" but kept listening.

karen's performance assignment:

Nicole, i want you to respond to the first set of questions that Craig has put out. You must follow these steps. 1. write your reponse 2. post your response 3. the first 3 women that call you, you have to read your response.

You can't tell them that this is part of a performance/lecture/ speech until you are done. If they insist on knowing what it is for then you have to explain in Russsian. If you are able to complete your performance, then you can explain to the person in English what you were doing. If the person hangs up, you can only explain to them what you did after 24 hours. If the person calls back, you must pick up where you left off.

You can not tell anyone about this assignment until you have completed it. If only one woman calls you on the day you start it, then it becomes a duration piece. Since you have caller ID, you only have one pass. That means, you can let the call go to voice mail, then you must call the person back b/c if you answer the call, you must perform.

Lastly, part of the documentation for the website, must include the responses from the women you performed for.
Warmly,
kgw

Thursday, February 3 7:30pm. Private showing for Katherine due to experimentation and nudity.

Combining indi's assignment and my reading of Annie Dillard's For the Time Being together with what I have learned about deaths in the 1995 Heat Wave I started thinking about the fact that in many cases heat wave victims were found dead in sweltering rooms that were totally sealed: closed windows, closed doors, no fan. I wanted to experiment with some intentional suffering: the body interacting with water and candlelight and oscillating fan but in the current Chicago seasonal context: winter.

so the action was sitting in the bathroom with window open in the tub alternately pouring cold water over my head and holding onto a candle. the oscillating fan blew on me from about a foot away, so one of my tasks was to keep the candle lit by sheltering it from the fan. I was interested in exploring these questions: How uncomfortable I would be? How quickly would I get really cold? When would I would start shivering? How violently would I shake? How I would deal with pouring cold water on my head? How long I could keep going?

I worked on that for 30-40 minutes but I could have gone longer. katherine watched from the bathroom floor and said the piece evoked loneliness.

indi's performance assignment, January 4, 2005:

annie dillard wrote an amazing essay that i read a few years ago about overwhelmingly large tragedies. coincidentally she reflects on a tidal wave that killed 138,000 in Bangladesh in 1991. in the essay she grapples with questions about humanity and god and explores stalin's quote "One death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic."
so the assignment is to read the article which is in her book For the Time Being. i haven't read the piece in awhile, i'm only going off of memory. but there are some connecting pieces-your russian with stalin, the event of another tidal wave tragedy in southeast asia, reflecting on why people care or don't care about the deaths of certain people. i'd like for you to find a way to commemorate all 700 people or so who died in the heat wave in some way exploring the theme of how to shed light and humanize such a large death toll and urban isolation. i'd like the use of candlelight (fire, heat) and it's opposite: water. i'd also like to be there for the performance sometime in the next year.

Tuesday, February 1 6:30 pm. Basement cafe of Ruth Page Center for the Arts, 1016 N. Dearborn Parkway. Performance of work in progress for Stitched & Stapled, the collection of stories & songs that touch on adventures in Russian theater. My audience was Alla Dekhtyar and the other people in the basement waiting for their daughters to finish ballet class. Alla was entertained. Someone else interrupted me to ask me to keep it down because she was trying to read, which prompted Alla to instruct me (in Russian) to perform it even louder. Something in this piece must be working, because we were both washed over with nostalgia for Bocha, our friend and the subject of this section of the piece.

Right: Irina Bochorishvili (Bocha)