Baltimore, Basketball and Beyond
at Tough, March 6 and 7
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Over the years, many prime performance venues have closed: Lower Links, MoMing Dance & Arts Center, and last month Randolph Street Gallery, the onetime mecca of Chicago performance. With the earlier closings, a new timidity began to seep into much of the city’s performance. Artists seemed more and more reluctant to mystify audiences, less willing to offer up tantalizing images defying explanation. Tragicomic hallucinations were replaced by melodramatic lecture-demonstrations. Meanings, once merely hinted at, were now spelled out in bold type. The work was easier to package and sell, but it didn’t require much more involvement from an audience than an above-average sitcom. All the geek-chic set could do to get that comforting rush of lyrical bewilderment was wait for the occasional piece from Goat Island, Michael K. Meyers, or Mathew Wilson.
I don’t know if “Tough Nights” curator Melinda Moran was around during the heyday of Chicago performance in the late 1980s (during her curtain speech she looked to be about 14). But with the opening weekend of this four-week series she’s tapped into all the elements that made those days distinctive: unabashed informality, complete disregard for commercial tastes, and, most important, the celebration of artistic ambiguity. The two works presented–Baltimore, Basketball and Beyond and Meeting Darrow–are as puzzling as they come. Both pieces defy passive observation; any meanings lie buried well beneath the surface. Because the artists have no interest in spoon-feeding, you have to bring all your imaginative faculties to bear. In a time when moronically schematic films like Forrest Gump and Titanic are imagined to be great cinema, such work is a tonic.
Despite Owens’s intentionally fragmented imagery, the musical structure of the piece holds it together, start to finish. And through it all Owens preserves an undercurrent of menace. Something is not quite right, though it’s never clear whether he wants to lash out at us or himself. He’s put himself in the demeaning position of the “darkie entertainer,” doing his verbal tap dances for the nearly all-white crowd, yet in the piece’s climax he establishes that he controls us, repeatedly insisting that people throw him the basketball although he refuses to catch it. Ultimately he makes us perform for him.
