Monday, October 12, 2009 PLEXUS part 1 PLEXUS Part 1

Today is Columbus Day in the United States. It’s not surprising, then, that I find myself thinking about Plexus. Cristoforo Colombo Viaggio nel Pianete Arte (Christopher Columbus Voyages to the Planet Art) was the last show I did with Plexus.

We did the show in Rome and Sardinia in the summer of 1989. Our hope had been that, in 1992, we – a consortium of performers, artists, and scientists, all from New York and Italy -- would be able to add the collective voice of Plexus to the 500 year anniversary celebration of his voyage. Unfortunately for us, larger forces were at work and a furor of political correctness made Columbus an impossible figure symbolic of the genocide perpetrated against Native Americans and the horrors of slavery. Our Columbus had little to do with the historic Columbus but that did not matter.

If you search the internet for Plexus a plethora of groups, companies and projects are listed in the search results. The Plexus that fascinated me for half a decade can be found at http://www.plexusforum.net. That site is maintained by Sandro Dernini, who brought our Plexus into being. Current manifestations of Plexus activity are nothing like the performance spectacles of the mid to late 1980s, when I was active with the group as dramaturge, and eventually impresario.

In 1985, I saw a Plexus event titled “Goya Time” at C.U.A.N.D.O., at the corner of Second Avenue and Houston, which immediately intrigued me. At that time, the theories of Antonin Artaud strongly influenced my thinking as a playwright. While the renunciation of text seemed to portend an end to dramatists, other elements of Artaud’s approach were intellectually provocative and artistically attractive to me.

For the previous 5 or 6 years, my plays were so text-bound that the only productions were staged readings, a format I have come to detest. Staged readings are, to me, the theatrical equivalent of a whore’s beckoning coo to passersby from a dark doorway. Publicly presented readings promise revelation and art when really they are staged to get money from potential backers. In not-for-profit theaters, the reading is sometimes used as a consolation to a playwright, when a rejection letter simply won’t do.

In any case, Plexus was clearly anything but conventional theater, and that appealed to me. Soon after seeing Goya Time, which appeared to me to be a tableau vivant infused with creative chaos, I met Sandro. As it happened, I was living in the back of a friend’s art gallery/studio on East Sixth Street between Avenues A and B, and Sandro was living in the building full of squatters next door. After a disastrous attempt at suburban living in New Jersey, which led to the disintegration of my marriage, I fled back to the Lower East Side; where, despite the horrific losses and absence of wet sex that came with the AIDS onslaught, a blossoming of gallery spaces was in full fecundity, while performance art had yet to be co-opted, codified and made arid by academe.

The first show I did with Sandro, and the hundreds of other artists who gravitated to the energy we created, was The Artificial Time of Purgatorio on the Night of No Moon. This was basically a happening on a grand scale. We took over most of the C.U.A.N.D.O. building – a former school that served as a community center – and we assigned artists spaces from the subbasement to the roof. Each artist was to interpret some portion of Dante’s Purgatorio. I wanted the spectators to follow a musical ensemble of some sort through the entire installation. This musical element never came together properly for a variety of reasons. The roof of the building was Paradiso – that’s where the bar was located – and the show ended there.

The absence of musicians leading people made the event seem a failure to me. As far as I could see, it was a bunch of artists showing their work in an alternative space. While Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty called for exposing audiences to the idea of participatory experience, our effort lost cohesion, and any sense of theatricality, to my mind anyway. The after party, though, was great and I did get laid.

A couple weeks later I got hired to write my first screenplay. I moved into a great apartment just off Gramercy Park. I counted Plexus as a noble failure and put it behind me. Or, so I thought. The siren call of Plexus would prove irresistible to me again, soon enough.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009 Plexus -- Sandro Sandro Dernini could keep people involved, no doubt. When there was no new art opera in the works, he would leave for Italy or Senegal, or disappear into the academic world of New York University. He was a doctoral candidate in art. He already had a doctorate in biochemistry but found his true calling in Plexus. Then, when apparently enough time has passed that a hunger had grown in the community, he would reappear.

Sandro’s technique was to announce an Open Call. Group photos were most often the reason. It always amazed me how many people would turn up in a vacant lot turned sculpture garden, or in the empty swimming pool in the basement of C.U.A.N.D.O., simply to have their photo taken among a huge group. But it worked, and out of these photo ops grew the art operas.

Plexus was about community as much as it was about art. Squatters, electricians, plumbers, musicians, poets, artists and scientists all were treated more or less equally. When Sandro wasn’t around, the energy that propelled Plexus was dormant. The community still existed but the catalyst that compelled us to work together was Sandro.

David Boyle, who was part of our core group through my years as an active Plexus participant, once remarked to me “You know, we’re all just fodder for Sandro’s PhD dissertation.” There was more than a little truth to that statement. Yet, I was conducting my own theatrical research and if Sandro got a doctorate in art along the way, all the better.

Don’t ever let some smug journalist convince you that everything that deserves to be covered gets covered. The New York press diligently ignored Plexus. We were the antithesis of the ethos of greed that passed for culture in those days. America, and New York in particular, was all about art stars and the art market. Certain dealers were deemed important by virtue of how much money was behind them.

By the end of Reagan’s two terms as President, even the general public bought into the idea that if an artist – meaning actor, musician, painter, sculptor, playwright, poet, et al – was not a millionaire by the age of 30, he was a loser and not serious, and her or his work would never have value. In youth-obsessed America, the European tradition of growing and maturing artistically was replaced by money-fueled hype. The most important substance to any work of art of any kind was the price tag or the profits it generated.

Sandro’s theme for Plexus was exposing and ending “art slavery”. We openly denounced the art market. The explosion of art galleries in the East Village was about gentrification and real estate, not about art or community. To indulge in understatement, the driving philosophy behind Plexus did not emerge triumphant -- yet.

While I was certainly sympathetic to the community mindset, I was primarily interested in Plexus as an avenue to create shows. The show I threw myself into with the most gusto was a year after the Purgatorio show. Titled Eve, it deserves and will receive an entire post later this week. Suffice it to say for the moment that the Plexus experience taught me two things that were very important to my growth as a theater artist. One was about myself and the other was more of a general overview.

The first lesson was that I thrive in a production situation. What goes on backstage fascinates me. It also can drive me nuts. The end result may not be to my satisfaction – as in the case of the Plexus production Il Viaggio del Serpente (The Voyage of the Serpent) -- but the end result is always a show, and I am always a better artist for helping to deliver the product.

The other thing I learned is that the non-textual approach espoused by Artaud, and others, works when the troupe is comprised of genuine artists. As soon as the door is opened to the community, you’d better have a strong story line at the very least. Civilians, for lack of a better term, get lost in theory and experimentation. This is not a bad thing. It’s simply the way things are.

That was how Sandro kept me involved as long as he did – group photos and letting me find myself as an artist, even if it appeared at times that I might overshadow his efforts. Plexus was the most interesting and enduring artistic collaboration of my career. It made me a showman.

Tomorrow -- Plexus and the firebug Posted by ukejackson at 11:29 AM Wednesday, October 14, 2009 Plexus and the Firebug There was a firebug in Plexus. I’m not talking about Richard Nugent, who published the literary quarterly FIRE during the Harlem Renaissance, and who played the Pope in the art opera Eve in 1986. Nor am I referring to the Italian performance artist (his name escapes me at the moment) who dressed up in a specially designed golden Minotaur costume and roller skated on the streets of the East Village with flames issuing from the horns, as well as his legs and arms. No. I am talking about an arsonist.

There were two core Plexus participants at the three “accidental” fires that I know about. I would be counted as a third except that I was next door when the squat on East Sixth Street was gutted by fire. Fortunately no one was hurt, though a number of people were forced into the street and had to seriously scramble to get roofs over their heads. I had been preparing to stage my death row drama “Monster Time” in the Shuttle Theater, which was in the basement of the squat and arguably the nicest space in the building. In any case, the building was old and the wood lath in the walls and stairwells burned hot and fast. The next two incidents, that I know of, occurred in Italy in the summer of 1989, the first on the island of Sardinia.

We were scheduled to perform the Columbus piece at a mountainside festival. Unfortunately, a one day train strike made us a day late arriving. Instead of Saturday night and a crowd that numbered more than 1,000, we performed on Sunday afternoon for an audience that numbered fewer than a hundred. It was only when we were leaving Sardinia that I discovered we could all have flown for roughly the same amount of money as the train and boat tickets cost, and been there in time.

Nonetheless, it was a beautiful journey. The boat traveled along the coast of Sardinia, which is a huge island, for quite awhile before we arrived at the port of Cagliari. Local artists put us all up. By this time I had married the television actress Sara Jackson, and she was totally into the energy and experimentation that was Plexus. Compared to her soap opera and TV commercials, this was Art.

However, the performer’s art is less exciting when the audience is the most minimalist element of a production. Sara and I had commissioned some great costumes for the Columbus show. (They were recycled and appeared again in my play “The Secret Warhol Rituals” several years later.) I had written a libretto composed entirely of Latin clichés but no one had yet learned their lines, so we were doing the show entirely as a pantomime, or a fashion show – depending on your perspective.

Everyone was fairly disappointed to have come all this way to perform for a handful of people. Say what you will about Plexus being an obscure moment in the annals of performance art in NYC in the late 20th century; when we put on a production the audience was huge – at least a thousand people would show up. Our performance on this remote Sardinian mountainside was listless. Then, suddenly, the mountainside was on fire around us. Tall dry grass was burning. Everyone, cast and audience alike, began to fight the blaze and, miraculously it seemed to me, we quelled it completely.

The third fire was a week later in Rome. This time the only people present were me and the only two others who had been present when the squat caught fire. The chair I was sitting in that caught fire. It started with smoke and when I jumped up flames were visible. We were in the apartment of a young woman who was part of the Roman contingent of Plexus. A pot of water from the kitchen put an end to this conflagration.

Some in Plexus have suggested that spontaneous combustion caused fire to erupt around us. I think it was someone getting their jollies and keeping things interesting in a dangerous way. I am not going to name either of the possible torches. One of them is innocent, and it has been more than twenty years. No one was hurt, and I’ve not heard of any further incidents. Impulsiveness wanes with age. And who is more impulsive than a firebug?

Tomorrow, I will write about Eve – an art opera that fulfilled my expectation Posted by ukejackson at 12:24 PM

Caro Sandro, Today, a couple months late, I began to keep my word to you. Today thru Saturday, I will be posting approximately 750 words a day about my participation in Plexus. When all 6 posts are complete, I will edit out some of the bits that are appropriate for a blog but not necessarily appropriate for your book.

You can follow the blog here: http://www.aplaywrightspeaks.blogspot.com/

So, sometime next week you will have my contribution. Better late than never. Be well. Uke Jackson PO Box 492 Delaware Water Gap, PA 18327 Mobile 570-426-1989 Uke Jackson’s web site www.ukejackson.com