If You Are Here, This Is for You
On the second (and last) night of Brian Ora Coya’s traveling one-man show, If You Are Here, This Is for You, I arrived at Hotel Kafka 15 minutes early–so I had to wait in the kitchen. Hotel Kafka isn’t a place of public lodging, just the name a loose collective of artists has given its sprawling Humboldt Park living space. They’ve been there for three years, content to present dance pieces, performance art, punk rock, and the like in near-total obscurity. Aside from word of mouth and the occasional flyer, they do nothing to publicize themselves, lacking even a mailing list. As one Hotel Kafka regular confessed to me, “If I hadn’t run into my friend on the street today, I wouldn’t have known this was going on.”
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Usually events take place in the basement, but Coya–who likewise ended up at Hotel Kafka through extremely informal channels–decided to mount his piece on the roof. And since the door to the roof is just off the kitchen, there I sat, a half-eaten bowl of soup on the table in front of me. Nearly every horizontal surface in the room was an inch or two deep in clutter, the air was thick with the smell of incense. Other theaters may invest thousands to make their lobbies comfortable, but this place is home.
It’s a tension that produces discomfort, both literally and metaphorically. No matter what Coya/Horn is talking about–his love of night, his run-ins with the cops, his effort to “outrun the tyranny of the practical”–he spends a fair amount of time in uncomfortable positions: stuffed into a tight sleeping bag, sitting on a tiny milk crate, hanging upside down from a hook mounted in the crotch of his pants. He may be “free,” insisting that “the only place I live is in my body,” but he can never seem to relax. Whether bundled up in a boxcar, shivering in a jail cell, or spread-eagled on the hood of a police car, life is to Coya and Horn what the pea was to the princess.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): uncredited photo.
