El Mexorcist (A Performance)

Abstract

In the past months, I’ve been writing, re-writing and testing in front of informal audiences of colleagues a series of spoken word performance texts. Some of these texts I found by digging through forgotten archives of my computer’s memory. I brought them back to life through obsessive re-writings, in dialogue with my colleague, City Lights editor Elaine Katzenberger. Others are transcripts of ad lib texts that spontaneously came to being during my solo performances. A few I wrote this year in direct response to political or pop cultural phenomena, exploring their effects on my views on art, activism, identity, sexuality and language. What these texts have in common is a tone - a kind of ironic and melancholic tone - and a unique form of vernacular philosophical inquiry that I feel are at the core of performance art and performance literature. Together they function as reflections on our millennial condition, as artists and cultural practitioners living in the US, a country that is undergoing an unprecedented cultural and political crisis. Some underlying questions are: Why do we continue doing what we are doing (in my case, writing and performing) against the backdrop of war, censorship, cultural paranoia and spiritual despair? What are the new roles that artists must undertake? Where are the new borders between the accepted and the forbidden? Is art still a pertinent form of inquiry and contestation? Is my audience really with me? Who are ‘we’ and who are ‘they’? Can I collaborate with my audience in the making of the performance? From whence do we draw the energy to continue? As a performance artist my job is precisely to ask questions in original ways.

Like most of my performance literature, these hybrid texts suffer from an identity crisis. Are they spoken word poetry, performance ‘monologues’, pop philosophy, art theory, post-colonial thought, or Chicano stand-up comedy? I truly don’t know. It is actually better that I don’t know. Like most of my literature, they are ‘open texts’, works in permanent progress, which means that their publication merely preserves them in one phase of their ongoing development. Together, I see them as both a multi-purpose literary bank and a script in permanent progress; documents of sorts for crossing the border into the new century. The form of these texts on the page is merely a performative strategy. Though they are poetic prose pieces, I have structured them like poems or monologues, in short sentences per line. This way, it is easier for me to read them aloud and to play with language rhythms and textures. My colleagues are constantly asking me why I chose to return to my solo spoken word material. First and foremost because my audiences asked me to do so. As I have toured with my troupe over the last three years, everywhere we go audiences tell me they want to hear my voice again. They want to know my current opinions about art and politics. They insist on hearing my voice, alone on stage, without excess performance paraphernalia. They ask and I must acquiesce. Furthermore, I feel that the complexities and subtleties imbedded in the content and form of these pieces couldn’t possibly be conveyed through my troupe work, which tends to be more experiential and collaborative. I begin performing this solo material sometime in early 2006. Every performance will utilize a different combination of texts and performative strategies. There will always be a 15-20 percent margin for improvisation, for specificity to the site, the city and the audience.