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performance.women's work
In my files, I found an unpublished story by Kathy Acker wedged in with material for a performance night at Martin Heath's, blacks of the smeary typewriting so dark and sensuous - there is a sense of obscure violation.
"The Scorpions" : excerpt from Janey's diary
"My friends were just like me. They were desperate - the products of broken families, poverty - and they were trying everything to escape their misery.
Despite the restrictions of school, we did exactly what we wanted and it was good. We got drunk. We used drugs. We fucked. We sexually hurt each other as much as we could. The speed, emotional overload, and pain every now and then dulled our brains. Demented our perceptory apparatus.
We knew we couldn't change the shit we were living in so we were trying to change ourselves."
- Kathy Acker, "The Scorpions", draft manuscript, 1978.
(in the margin, Acker has scrawled, "French girl, fat lady, middle-aged shriveled man". These are my parts to read at Martin's)...
Much of the history of performance by women in Toronto is buried in the artists' filing cabinets. Depending on how you look at it, live art by women either thrives or subsists in the self-funded margins. Certainly, many women never get off the "stepping stone" of this invisible economy. A 1980 listing in SLATE magazine for the Cabana Room of the Spadina Hotel includes art bands (The Lounge Lizards from New York, The Government), a video night, and several evenings of performance cabaret. Susan Britton and Robin Wall, the Cabana Room producer/programmers, put a spotlight on live art by women; some worked as hack writers and arts bureaucrats; others, like Margaret Dragu and Electra, worked as strippers. Many of the rants, readings and actions deployed the feminist strategy of representing women's work (housewife, stripper, typist), in various breeds of "femme drag" attenuated to the registers of neurosis, anxiety humour or violence. The Cabana Room stage was puny, tech support minimal, and the crowded smoky booze-soaked ambiance fueled lapses and eruptions in the levels of audience attention and interaction. Perhaps the Cabana Room's fatal flaw was its lack of critical self-awareness around issues of performance, confrontation and controls; a performer (Margaret Dragu) was attacked by a "neoist" audience member who argued that his degrading "intervention" that included pulling a tampon out, was an art initiative. In retrospect, it is hard to fathom how everybody just stood there - the artists in the room didn't boot the guy out or make plain that this wasn't their idea of art.
The art community's ambivalence about the attack and the performer's ensuing court case signaled the Cabana Room's demise and underlined the lack of a women's/feminist art venue in Toronto, an absence subsequently addressed by the Women's Cultural Building Collective. The name here is misleading because, although the collective was formed in a doomed attempt to inhabit the dreary and dying Pauline McGibbon Cultural Centre, the WCBC lived on as a nomadic programming entity, focusing on feminist performance and humour. An ideological formation took shape with the foundation of the WBCB in the aftermath of the Cabana Room debacle : feminist space=safe working environment=a place free of drunk punks. One could argue that the emphasis on safety was accompanied by a measure of self-censorship. The stances of punk-laced women's live art at the Cabana Room were less in evidence at the WCBC events - satire displaced provocative anxiety; mocking critiques of sexist popular culture and family life eclipsed noir-ish erotically-charged accounts of addiction, poverty, sexual power and sexual violence. Farce replaced in-your-face displays of anger and defiance.
As a footnote, Kathy Goes To Haiti, written by Kathy Acker and originally published in an edition of 1,000 by Rumour Publications in 1979 in Toronto, was recently republished by Grove Press in the triptych of novels (Title?). Rumour wasn't even credited as the original publisher. The Grove edition was banned from Canada at the border by Customs. Of course, they didn't know the book was already here.
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