Acouple years ago, the performance collective known as Lucky Pierre checked into a local motel and watched classic Hollywood westerns for 24 hours straight. No, it wasn’t a conceptual performance piece–they were doing research for their 1998 show, I Married Wyatt Earp, a baroque, gadget-heavy romp through the iconography of the American Technicolor west. By acting out such oater cliches as tossing someone down the length of a bar and smashing a bottle over his head, all while maintaining emotionally neutral expressions, the performers wrung lyricism from kitsch.
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Now they’ve begun a yearlong project that may as well be titled “Lucky Pierre With a Thyroid Condition.” The group is presenting a series of three 12-hour performance pieces, shows that put the “endurance” back in endurance art. In the first installment, The Soil and the Climate, performed in March, they showed the movie Easy Rider six times in a row. Each of the six Luckys had written a new screenplay to accompany it, and at each showing a guest performer recited one as it was read to him or her through headphones by its author. At the same time, someone in another room was reading Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s endless poem Evangeline into a walkie-talkie, transmitting it to a Lucky who transcribed it word for word on a monumental 10-by-24-foot blackboard. At the end of 12 hours, they’d made it halfway through the poem.
But The Soil and the Climate wasn’t just a performance; it was a community event. Some 45 artists showed up to participate, including members of Goat Island and Redmoon, as well as assorted painters, sculptors, monologuists, and experimental musicians. “And some dancing girls,” company cofounder Michael Thomas adds.
Zerkel and Thomas are the only remaining members of the original quartet. Thomas got into performance art after failing as an actor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. “They actually told me I was bad, and this was at a state school,” he says. “It’s not like I was at Yale or anything.”
“It’s like the film Woodstock,” Thomas adds. “It was such an unslick event, such a community. And in some ways–this is going to sound really queer–it’s sort of a reflection of our wanting to bring all of these people together, all these people we really love.”
