I wanna daughter so I can kill cops

I wanna daughter so I can kill cops

or perhaps,

I wanna die saving a (sexy) woman

Since Fall 2012 I have watched a lot of action films. I would type searches like: best political action films, best action films of all time, best political thrillers, best action films with a female lead, then make lists and start streaming. I was annoyed by tired tropes of cold war fantasies and racially or ethnically defined “bad guys” but I kept watching. I took delight with the number of cops and government agents killed in these movies and how often cops, CIA, FBI, and anyone who worked for the government were portrayed as corrupt, profiteering, racist, and inept. I also became curious and critical in learning how US nationalism could be salvaged, manufactured, and glorified in these narratives through the use of morally correct rogue agents or cops, i.e., through handsome butch white masculinity, excellent fighting technique, and insensitivity to pain. Pride in country, faith in war, and acceptance of torture and murder went hand in hand with demonstrating that cops and government are both dirty and stupid. This combination cynically seduces populist success while avoiding the dangerous political critique that seems always just outside the frame (of the picture, of our imaginations, of the industry). 

I barely know how to address the sexism and racism in most action films and I'm sure that many have done it already, even if I'm not aware of their work. Very few action films can pass the Bechdel test: Do two women talk to each other, about something other than a man? The Bechdel test emerged as a satirical joke and was not intended as rigorous analysis. There are similar “tests” questioning whether a film has two people of color or two African Americans who talk to each other about something other than race. That these tests do not provide a complete analysis of a movie's treatment of race, color, gender, and sexuality, does not deny the foundational supremacist structures - male and white - that are firmly in place in way too many action films. 

Anyway, I'm more of a performance artist than a film critic, so I wrote a speech to address the overwhelming narrative tendency of man-saves-woman, or man-revenges-woman's death, to justify massive human, environmental, and architectural carnage. These exhausted and exhausting narratives frame white woman and girls as weak and vulnerable so that we (an image of) the heroic macho and morally righteous white man and the country he stands for can recuperated or salvaged. Both white man and white nation are crippled by the end of the movie but on the mend. Racialized representations of evil are so banal in these films that the popular imagination has been molded into a catalogue of types reinforced by TV news, courtroom proceedings, and popular history books. 

In “Why are women always being kidnapped in films? ( UK Guardian, Nov 2013), Anne Billson refers to female kidnappings as “the laziest of flimsy plot devices” that reduce the female character to a chattel, tied to a chair, dragged screaming across a warehouse or a fancy office or a bourgeois home, “a crime of theft committed against her husband, boyfriend, or father.” These movies don't get awards from the Academy or in Cannes but they make shit loads of money for a really small number of people, most of whom are straight white men, or can play one in a movie.

I wanna daughter so I can kill cops

or perhaps,

I wanna die saving a (sexy) woman

I wanna daughter so I can kill tons of people to protect her.

I want the roles that Liam Neeson gets to work out his grief and rage.

I wanna kill people and bash their brains in and blow up their houses to save my wife or daughter.

I want the roles that Jason Stathem gets because I wanna kill tons of people to protect a nun or my wife or my daughter and her best friend.

I wanna perfect that look that says: I don't want to kill people unless I have to.

I want an amazing gun with unlimited bullets or cartridges so I can kill people while saving women from asshole guys who value profits more than female lives.

I wanna be a rogue cop, a good guy cop, in Baltimore or New York or LA or Hong Kong,

in a TV series, in which avenging the death of women gives me license to rough guys up, punch dudes in the face, and break every kind of law ever written.

I especially want someone to kidnap my daughter so I can kill cops.

Tons of cops.

I wanna kill inept cops, stupid cops, corrupt cops, racist cops, and the cops who are always protecting the newest gang of Russian or Serbian or Chinese criminals.

I wanna learn to kill with my bare hands, throwing knives, shooting guns, cross bows, artillery of all kinds.

I wanna play a trained killer with post traumatic stress.

I wanna play an elite Navy seal with paranoid delusions and a broken heart.

I wanna play a black ops assassin with amnesia.

I wanna play a trained killer, an elite super soldier, who has such intense amnesia I can't even remember my name or my wife's name, but I can meet new women to protect and then be confronted with hundreds of stupid cops that deserve to die because they're corrupt and have terrible aim, and FBI agents that deserve to die because they're corrupt and know more about me than I do and they're running dirty black ops that should have been shut down in the 50s or the 80s but after 9/11 are more funded and more dirty than ever.

Yah give me a woman to save from the clutches of evil and I will kill as many cops and FBI agents and ethnic mafia and Arab terrorists as you can throw at me.

I wanna play a highly trained killer with amnesia who can somehow find my stash of fake passports and stacks of dollars, yen, and euros.

I wanna play a frighteningly traumatized straight guy with nothing to lose because it's already all been taken.

I wanna play a drugged and disoriented professional assassin with such crazy embodied intelligence and blood memory that I can remember anything about any weapon ever designed but I can't find my name or my parents or my girlfriend.

I wanna play the badass good guy that bad guys provoke by kidnapping my mom or my girlfriend, and then torture her just to get me to respond.

I wanna play a crazy post traumatic stress super soldier who can't remember my name who goes on a terrifying revenge tour around Wall Street, the Kremlin, the Whitehouse, the Arc de Triomphe, a brand new skyscraper in Dubai or Shanghai, or some gorgeous Greek or South Asian island.

I wanna kill the bad people who killed my girlfriend and then ran my parents off the road to make it look like an accident.

I wanna make the world safe again for good people, and white women, and especially white little girls. I wanna play an ex soldier, an ex assassin, an ex sharp shooter, an ex secret agent.

I wanna play a dude who just wants to be a straight white low key dude again, but who is dragged back into the killing game by bad motherfuckers who just can't give it up, who would get my daughter addicted to heroin or crack or oxy before selling her to a super wealthy Arab or Russian with a killer yacht.

I wanna blow that yacht up after I machine gun 20 hot security thugs wearing excellent sunglasses.

I wanna kill for god and justice and country even if it seems like I no longer believe in anything.

I wanna kill people and know that deep down, with your consent, that those people deserved to die and those buildings deserved to be blown up and that anyone caught in the cross fire or who had to run terrified as my helicopter crashed into their office while they were at work on payroll taxes will totally understand that cleansing the world of corrupt violent men demands occasional waves of intensified and over exaggerated urban massacres.

I wanna be an ex CIA black ops assassin who moves to a small town and tries to have a normal family that can be kidnapped and tortured to get me back into my killing game.

I want Schwartznegger's role in Commando.

I want to save my kidnapped daughter, while taking down a South American dictator and single handedly destroying the drug flow from Columbia.

I wanna kill 150 badass Latino guys in a one man assault at the drug lord's secret jungle hide out.

I wanna kill corrupt politicians and their security team by shooting their escape helicopter out of the sky.

And I wanna free my kidnapped, abused, sexually humiliated daughter as the copter explodes into a fiery tornado and crashes into the secret drug warehouse burning everything to the ground.

I wanna play Nicholas Cage in Stolen, Eric Bana in Hana, and Nicholas Cage in Kick Ass.

I wanna use my advanced killer training to teach my daughter to protect herself and eventually to kill her own evil mother who works for the CIA or the cops or a major financial institution. And I want to kill a bunch of nefarious dudes right in front of her so she knows that she will never be safe without a gun in her hand, a blade at her hip, and hair dye to change her looks.

I wanna play a genetically modified super killer with amnesia who feels no pain and can speak ten languages and knows that all women I come in contact with will either get shot, kidnapped, sold into slavery, or have to cut and die their hair in a hotel bathroom.

I wanna play Matt Damon, Jeremy Reiner, or any other non balding square jaw who will never need to change my look even when my photo is uploaded to every Mi6, KGB, CIA, and Mossad agent in the world.

I wanna play an amazing USAmerican super killer and cyber genius whose bruised and broken faith in his country can only be restored through a fight to the death with zombie Russians or genetically modified Russians or triple agent Russian oil spies, because Russia is still our greatest enemy and without evil Russia there is no democratic USA.

If I'm gonna die, I wanna die saving my own daughter, or any girl, a really sexy girl, or all the girls and bring glory to my country.

If I'm gonna die I wanna die saving all the women of Afghanistan or Libya or Iraq or all Muslim women or all the prostitutes or all the sex slaves.

I wanna kill 100 perps and johns and another 100 dirty cops and politicians so I can save a single trafficked woman in New York or Bangkok or Sydney or Vegas.

I wanna bust some heads and shoot out some kneecaps and burn a few sex prisons to the ground so I can stop an international sex slavery ring run by an ethnically diverse collaboration of evil Chinese, Indonesian, Serbian, and African American criminal misogynists, strip club owners, and child pornographers.

I wanna chase down the top bad guy, I mean the untouchable serial rapist mass assassin who wants to destroy the world in the image of his own destroyed soul and if that means shooting up a Nigerian slum or a Thai slum or a Mexican slum or an African American public housing block or a Palestinian refugee camp or a historic Moroccan market, then I will.

Shoot to kill.

Stab the heart.

Snap the neck.

Save the (white) girl.

(repeat till exhausted)

10th Anniversary of the War & Occupation of Iraq (I Tried To Stop The War)

A performance poem based on a protest chant spontaneously created by 30 or 40 mostly anarchists and witches during a protest against the first Gulf war, in February 1991. When AWOL (Artists and Writers Out Loud) asked me to perform at a rally "after the war", I scribbled it down and yelled it from a megaphone in front of SF City Hall. Then it was integrated into my solo performance, The King Is Dead (Long Live The King) which was presented in San Francisco and Auckland. In collaboration with Essex Hemphill (RIP), the text was edited slightly and then performed as a duet to benefit The Bastard Review at New College of California, later in 1991.  

Dedicated to the 200,000 Bay Areans who publicly protested the oil war.

 I TRIED TO STOP THE WAR

Oh yeah, I tried to stop the war
I tried to stop the war
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I tried marching in the street
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I tried yelling my head off and beating a drum
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I tried blaming the war on George Bush
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I tried exposing the war at home
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I tried calling Saddam Hussein an evil wicked tyrant
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I wrote letters connecting George Bush 
to the corporate shadow government 
that hates its own people
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I tried saying Peace is Patriotic
and War is not Peace
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I tried voting
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I tried not voting
BUT THAT DIDN'T WORK EITHER! 
I tried to learn about Iraq
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I tried to learn from history
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I tried to blame the borders 
i tried supporting self-determination
I tried hating imperialism and refusing to rape
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
NOTHING WORKED!
I COULDN'T STOP THE WAR.
I tried healing my inner child
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I tried healing Saddam Hussein's inner child
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I tried blaming the war on Saddam's mother
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I tried blaming the war 
on Bush's emotionally dysfunctional father
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I COULDN'T STOP THE WAR.
I tried sharing my fears with friends
I tried calling home and bonding with my family
I tried late nite prayers in circles and ritual bathing
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I tried raising sexual energy
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I tried minding my own fucking business
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
cuz the war invaded my dreams
and all my friends were talking about it
and all the papers and air waves were full of it
so I tried to blame the war on racism
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I tried to blame the war on male violence, homophobia, 
and gross warrior romanticism
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I tried to blame the war on penis size
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I tried to blame the war on sexism
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I tried to connect sexism with disasters in the environment
I called the earth my mother
I warned about oil spills and endless fires and dead dolphins 
and screaming birds
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I tried complaining about the costs
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I tried exposing the profits of oil and guns
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I chanted, Money for AIDS not for war
Money for AIDS not for war
Money for AIDS not for war
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I said think of the children, listen to the earth, think of the future, 
listen to veterans, listen to womyn, listen to queers, 
think of the future, look at the past, 
remember Hiroshima, Tienanmen Square, Bangladesh, Soweto
I said think look listen feel
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I said think look listen feel
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I promised to think positively
to focus on light
to do good 
to respect all my relations
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
I tried to escape the war
I tried to keep working
not to get distracted by the war
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
Everywhere I could sense the war
Every siren was a death I could feel
Every flag was a child in flames
Every headline was a community in prison,
a family separated, a history forgotten
a family separated, a history forgotten
I expected the police at my doorstep
I expected the church in my bed
I predicted heroes and parades and speeches by serial murderers
and it came true
IT CAME TRUE!
I COULDN'T ESCAPE THE WAR
When I yelled no one heard me.
When I walked on stilts only my friends saw me.
I COULDN'T STOP THE WAR 
Nothing seemed to work
We returned to the streets
We blocked the federal building
We took the bridge 
We exploded a cop car
We made art
We refused to make art
We sat down
We stood up 
We walked and walked and talked and talked
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
We hugged and healed and felt and witnessed and blessed and learned
BUT IT DIDN'T WORK!
WE COULDN'T STOP THE WAR.
Not the war in iraq
Not the war at home
Not the war inside
Not the war between womyn and men
Between animals and people
Between property and freedom
We couldn't stop the war against sex
We couldn't stop the war against art
IT DIDN'T WORK
IT DIDN'T WORK
IT DIDN'T WORK
WE COULDN'T STOP THE WAR!


Keith Hennessy, 1991, The Mission, San Francisco

In 2013 I added the word cop before car, 
surprised that it wasn't always there.

10th Anniversary of the War Against Iraq (Illegal Bride)

ILLEGAL BRIDE

by Keith Hennessy, from the solo performance Chosen (2005).

(Performed in a re-purposed, long, white wedding gown with fetish details by Jack Davis, periodically drinking apple cider vinegar with a straw, gagging and drooling excessively, while standing on the fire escape of Dance Mission Theater in a piss and junk alley off 24th St. in San Francisco.)

A piss and vinegar letter in honor of the dead world citizens

since September 11, 2001.

Dear George W Bush

Dear Mr Cheney, Mr Rumsfield, Dr Rice, Mr Wolfowitz, Mr Gonzalez,

Dear Mr. Bechtel, Mr. Chevron, Mr Lockhead Martin, Mr Monsanto, Mr Smart Bomb, Mr & Ms New American Century,

Dear Mr. Billionaire who doesn’t pay taxes

Dear all you poor suckers, you grief stricken and fear frozen, overworked and underpaid, flag waving Americans who are so lost in your own pain that …

Dear all of you. Fuck you.

Refrain: I told you so, I told you so, I fucking told you so

I told you that war always kills children

I told you that there’d be no way to win this war

without bankrupting the US,

without destroying the hopes of our youth…

leading to more hungry, illiterate, and orphaned children

Refrain: I told you so…

I don’t want to talk about it

It hurts

It hurts that the killing continues

as I speak, as I drink, and even as I sleep

It hurts while the starvation and bad water continue

While the profits of Carlysle, Bechtel, Chevron, and Haliburton continue

It hurts while the profits of the Saudi and Kuwaiti royal families,

the Bush and Bin Laden royal families, the Fox and CNN royal families continue

While the repression of female power, education, community and health continues

Don’t make me give all the details

You fucking know it

I told you so

Everyone told you so

Even your own goddamned experts must have told you that most Iraqi citizens would never forgive the first Gulf War

All the cruel killing, war crimes and destruction of water treatment plants, pharmaceutical factories, and other essential services.

You are responsible for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children

and even more adults in the 10 years preceding 9.11 and yet you dare to brag, “We bring freedom to tortured souls!”

Meanwhile after 3 years of illegal imprisonment and torture there have been no convictions of Guantanamo prisoners! No terrorists found.

And the International Red Cross says that 70% of Iraqi prisoners in US custody were arrested by mistake, have no intelligence value, and will never be charged with anything, and yet you force them to suck each other off on camera.

You couldn’t find a terrorist if you were looking in the mirror.

Instead of asking, “why do they hate us?”,

we should be asking,

“What will it take to disrupt America’s fake-ass innocence and total denial of the crimes of the corporate state?

Crimes which we support every time we drive a car, lace up our sneakers, and eat an ear of corn.”

Refrain: I told you so…

Refrain: I told you so…

I hate that revenge is culturally acceptable in Washington, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Hollywood, Ramallah, Jakarta, London, Beijing, Fruitvale and the Mission.

I hate the cynical tactic of terrorizing people into accepting the punishment of others, of accepting that entire nations are evil enemies to be violently contained.

Every war and occupation is based on the same fucked up logic that Hitler triumphed and that’s why I name you all fascists.

Refrain: I told you so…

With 15 million people in the streets on the same day I told you so

With the majority of the UN I told you so

But you don’t seem to care about the UN.

What the fuck is the matter with you?

The entire hope of the UN is the promise of NEVER AGAIN;

of promising to the hearts ripped open with grief and betrayal that a liberation of body, soul and planet is possible blah blah blah

But you hate hope

What the fuck is the matter with you?

Over 3,000 humans died in the attacks of September 11, 2001

And since then you’ve killed more than 20 times that including 1400 US Soldiers, at least 3000 Afghani civilians and a minimum of 20,000 Iraqi civilians...*

How many need to die? How many need to lose a leg or an eye?

Your wounds cannot be healed by the blood of dead children.

Stop killing their babies!

Stop killing their babies!

Why are you so fucking cruel?

You don’t fucking care about safety, about home, land, security?

You’ll kill anyone anywhere just to make everyone more depressed, more afraid, more anxious, more likely to kill.

The more you kill, humiliate, and starve,

the more danger and terror you bring to your own home.

You’re the number one inspiration for fundamentalist religious violence.

You have trained, funded, and armed terrorists.

You practically invented Al Queda.

You befriended and funded Saddam for years.

You collaborate with anti-democratic torturous regimes all over the world including Pakistan, Indonesia, China and Saudi Arabia.

You lied, you lied, you lied, and you lied again.

You’re a bunch of mass murder war criminals who ought to rotting in a prison made just for wealthy cynics.

Refrain: I told you so…

But you don’t listen

You don’t listen cuz I’m a drunk homo bride with no land to call my own

Yah you don’t listen cuz I’m a drunk homo bride with no land to call my own and I confuse all the issues.

But I give up. You win.

Now fuck off and leave me alone.

(every time it was performed there was a PS or two... mostly to address an immediate news event or terrible feeling I was carrying around... Here are the PS's that I could find:)

PS. 2008

Fuck you San Francisco for supporting Gavin Newsom. It was a sad day for democracy when he ran unopposed. Evictions continue. The rents are way too high. The homeless and mentally ill have received neither Care nor Cash. Fuck Don Fisher. Fuck Warren Hellman. Fuck Getty, Feinstein, Newsom, and the all the rich trash who want this city for themselves.

And a special fuck you to Barak Obama and Hilary Clinton, one of whom will be the next president of the United States of Global Terror and Endless War. Neither one of you will have the integrity or courage to get out of Iraq. You will maintain the chaos, you will maintain the sink hole of tax dollars which will compromise every progressive social vision that you’ve ever had, you will continue to protect the oil companies and the hugest of profiteering corporations, public schools and hospitals in the US will continue to suffer while illiterate children continue to starve in this great country, and you will continue to support Israel’s ongoing imperialist strategies of Palestinian erasure. I’m already sick of your empty promises, fake smiles, and online donations. Fuck you.

PS. 2005

To all those gain grotesquely from Halliburton’s pathological profiteering in Iraq, spending billions on US military bases and zero on hospitals, schools and homes, fuck you. And that includes Dick Cheney & Condi Rice, Halliburton’s filthy rich thieving friends in the White House, and to Alberto Gonzalez who supplied the legal justification to torture anyone who gets in the way of those profits, fuck all of you.

PPS. And a special fuck you to each and every employee of the CIA for intentionally fucking up democratic hopes and movements from Guatemala to Guantanamo, from Haiti to Indonesia, from Iran to El Salvador. Instead of preventing 9/11 and catching your buddy Osama, instead of supporting peaceful uprisings to oppressive regimes, instead of feeding all the people and teaching the world to read, you’re just a bunch of overpaid, dumb ass terrorists. Whatever. Fuck you too. I’m out.

PS. 2004

I don’t care how many marriage licenses Gavin Newsom signs.

As long as he refuses to tax the corporations who own downtown,

and refuses to stop bullying our poorest citizens, he’s an enemy of the people.

And a special fuck you to all who praise Ronald Reagan (after his death in 2004). His political career was a disaster for humanity, an insult to democracy, and a scourge upon the hardest working peoples of the world. He stood on the wrong side of every liberation struggle... AIDS, Central America, women...

*…(Iraq Body Count)

PERFORM THE KEITH SCORE

Here's a story about performing improvisation followed by everything you (or I) need to perform my most recent 'piece'. Of course you can also read this as a description of recent improv performances...

Keith Score
A solo performance by Keith Hennessy developed unintentionally while improvising.
Written documentation, July 20, 2009, Berlin

I have been performing solo improvisations since the early 80s. I think my first spontaneous choreographies for an audience were in 1982 or 83 at The Alchemy Lab, a weekly improv ‘club’ held in a side room of the Fillmore West in San Francisco. Since these earliest experiments I have merged talking and dancing to extend postmodern dance into mongrel post-genre performance[1]. When I perform improvisation I am sharing a particular research practice that informs nearly every aspect of my life: how I make art, how I live in my body, how I participate in social movements, how I clean the house, how I relate to others, how I experience or sense the world around me, how I make decisions, how I make money, how and what I teach, how I sense and play with energy, how I relate to spiritual and religious ideas and feelings, how I consider memory and history. Although my influences are many and ongoing, here is a list of the primary artists and situations that have inspired me to improvise in performance: the wide network of contact improvisation jams and festivals, Dena Davida/Catpoto (Montréal), Lucas Hoving, Terry Sendgraff, Ed Mock, Sara Shelton Mann and Contraband, Mangrove, Akira Kasai, and the performances Unsafe, Unsuited (with Patrick Scully & Ishmael Houston-Jones) and Antibody.

In the past year I’ve performed a few solo improvisations that have generated a series of actions, images and moments that I would like to gather into a new choreographic project. I intend to perform this work and am also interested in it being performed by others. This work, tentatively titled Keith Score, is my first piece made without a political or ritual intention distinct from the ritual and politics of improvisation, i.e., distinct from performing the making of performing, i.e., my first unintentionally sourced choreography/performance. This score will most likely be updated after further testing in performance and/or watching videos of past performances.

Tech requirements.

Space

A space in which all of the audience can see the floor.

In the round is possible but other audience configurations are preferred, e.g., frontal, two or three sides, ¾.

White or grey floor preferred.

Present the space as raw as possible: no wings or back curtain or objects that can’t be removed.

Light

A fully lit space, prefer no color. Some light on the audience.

2 (two) instruments, on the floor, with long cables, to be manipulated/placed by the performer.

1 (one) light operator, available for spontaneous requests from the performer, based on pre-discussed options.

Sound

1 (one) microphone with cable. For extra safety, tape the mic to the cable.

1 mic stand.

On stage monitor if possible.

Reverb if possible.

1 (one) sound operator, available for spontaneous requests from the performer, based on pre-discussed options.

The sound/light operator can be the same person.

Costumes, Objects

Carried on stage in two cheap plastic shopping bags, preferably not identical.

• Digital camera.

• Black ruffle under shorts, like what a vintage cancan dancer might wear.

• Flesh-colored dance belt (cover genitals, reveal ass).

• For women with mid-large breasts, a flesh-colored bra.

These under-garments are not about modesty; they are about erasure, history, fetish and representation. They are intended as the most minimal costume that transforms a naked body into a ‘dancer’s body.’

• Long strand of pearls (fake or fresh water), to wrap 3 times around neck.

• Sequined gauntlets, approx. 5-8”. You’ll probably have to make your own.

• Stirrup tights. Preferably a little too big, bright colors, floral or of nostalgic or personal significance.

• A mask. My friend found my mask on the street. I will try to figure out what it is and buy more of them. Until then, the mask should be latex, cover the whole head, preferably not have a mouth hole, have some kind of hair, and be as unmonstrous as possible.

• A sequined dress. Preferably fabulous, or fabulous kitsch, not perfectly fitting, old/vintage, mid-thigh length.

Optional

Some object, costume, or food that you have never worked with. To use if you feel stuck, shitty, lost and have already (1) tried everything I’ve suggested or that you know to keep an improv alive, and (2) have reported to the audience that you are stuck, feeling shitty, and/or lost.

Time

The length of the piece is 30 to 70 minutes.

The Score

One

Walk out in some version of street wear, clothes you wear everyday, not special. Introduce yourself and say hello to the audience. Say a few more things.

I might introduce myself, or ask the audience if they’re comfortable and ready. I ask if someone is willing to document and I give them the camera. I tell them to pass it along if they get bored or uninterested in taking pictures. In the past I have told the audience what I’ve pre-decided and that the rest of the performance is some kind of open improvisation, often referencing certain tricks or devices I’ve been doing for years. I’ve been questioned about this device of performance informality, this performance of “I’m just another one of you.” Am I sincere or manipulative, casual or calculating? Yes; And. I try to act reassuring, inclusive, and yet prepare them for an adventure.

Two

Take off clothes (everything) and put on black ruffle shorts. Start to drool saliva into palms of hands and rub it into your legs, stroking down towards feet. If your legs are hairy, your goal is to smooth the hair. Before you run out of spit, or after 5 or 6 drools, tell the audience that you don’t have enough spit to complete the job, and suggest that they get ready to contribute. If someone snorts or jokes about coughing up phlegm, politely instruct them to gather only saliva, only from the mouth. Go towards the audience with cupped palms. Request volunteers. After 1 or 2 contributions, smear the saliva down your legs. Continue, working different sections of the audience, until you have covered all of your exposed legs from hem of shorts to ankles. If you have a particularly big contribution, press both palms together and then pull apart to show the audience, catching the light with the suspended saliva. When you feel done with this task, walk back to the stage or playing area, smearing any excess saliva into your head hair, torso, and/or face.

Three

Take off black shorts. Put on the dance belt (and bra). Say: “I am not wearing this costume to make me look good.”

Put on the pearls. As you wrap them three times, say: “Pearls mean mother.”

Put on gauntlets. Say, “Sequins mean gay.”

Put on mask.

Stand in parallel. Think Paxton’s stand, the small dance. Feel any tension in the body and play with exaggerating (tightening) and relaxing it. Turn head to get used to mask and how people respond to it.

Four

Shift from two-foot stand to balance on the outside of one foot for 2-3 minutes. This will involve a lot of falling off balance, adjustments, changing facing, waving of arms and free leg to maintain balance. When possible, drop arms and try to relax as much of the body as possible. This should be rehearsed! I’ve been standing (and turning, and jumping) on the sides of my feet for years and I still feel a little sore, overstretched in the ankle, the next day.

Five

Improvise dancing. Keep your energy bright. Don’t stay on your feet. Don’t stay facing the audience. Try going to a new place in the room to stand on one foot (flat or side).

Six

When you start to breath more deeply, heavily, play with sucking the mask to your mouth. Breathe audibly, rhythmically. Continue to improvise movement, space, action. Push yourself. If you can almost do the splits, play with stretching yourself. If splits are easy, try some other contortion. Look for body limits, borders, and play there. Follow sensations, respond to impulses, don’t get distracted with comedy and audience laughter. Continue to give yourself tasks, explorations, adventures. When in doubt, run to a new location and stand on one foot. Or hold your breath as long as possible, moving only on the exhale, or the inhale.

Seven

Use a finger to push the mask into your mouth. Biting from the inside changes the expression of the mask. Continue exploring movement.

Eight

Lift the mask part way off (half-way?) and turn it backwards, but leave it on your head. Continue moving, adding the game of twisting the body into shapes that play with perceptions of front and back. Headstands with mask face towards audience can be funny, curious, weird.

Nine

Go and get one of the floor lights. Bring it somewhere. Ask the operator to turn it on and dim all other lights. Add the second light. Focus it in some kind of counterpoint with the first. Take off the mask and leave it somewhere in the light.

Ten

Go and get the microphone. Stand somewhere in relation to the light/dark spaces you have just created. Swing microphone over your head. Listen. Adjusting length of cable, change the sound. Listen. Like a lasso artist or fire spinner, lower yourself to the ground until you are lying on your back. Fold one leg under you to recall the standing on one leg. Keep swinging the mic while remembering/translating the balancing on one foot. The audience will probably laugh with recognition and you might enjoy the absurdity. Stay focused on a most accurate translation, remembering.

The sound operator might choose to collaborate, changing the bass/treble or volume or speaker. His/her changes should be subtle, at least at first, so that initially the sound is coming only from the swinging mic and the dancer listening.

In Mexico I couldn’t have any floor lights so when I swung the mic in the fully lit space I walked closer to the audience and let some people be concerned that they or someone else might get hit, hurt. In Germany I began this section by measuring out the cable to make sure I didn’t hit pillars.

Eleven

Sit or stand, while still swinging the mic. Slowly decrease the length of cable until you can grab the mic. Speak slowly into the mic, listening and responding to the sound of your own voice, “A microphone is for speaking, or singing.” Say anything else, or make any other mouth sounds, that you want. Then say, at least once, “Now I will bake a cake.” Try to balance the mic vertically, on the floor, or on your body. Catch it as it falls. Repeat. Explore its movement and sound[2].

Twelve

Place the mic on the ground. Lay down with your mouth at the mic. Make a quick choice about where you want to be in the light. You can change location, or relation to light, or light positions at any time. Sing something, quietly. If you get distracted while singing, tell the audience what you’re thinking. This can lead to improvising with light, sound, mic, body, dance, language. You might tie the mic around your neck, or put it in your dance belt (or bra). You might drag it gently across the floor or around your body. (You also might do this much later…). In Chicago and San Francisco I focused more on making sound with the mic against my body or costume. In Mexico I didn’t speak as much because too many people didn’t speak English. In Germany I started singing House of the Rising Sun and then made lyric links to Summertime (thinking about descriptions of momma & daddy).

Thirteen

When you feel ready to change or if you feel lost or distracted, take off the pearls and sequined gauntlets. The next time you want or need to change (after 30 seconds or 10 minutes…), ask the tech operator to bring the lights back up. Move the floor lights and then put on a pair of stirrup tights, preferably floral, bright colored, or of personal significance. My stirrup tights were a gift from Remy Charlip[3]. You might tell the audience, briefly, the story of your tights while putting them on.

The performance is kinda free form by now. You might want to put on the tights and not change the lights. Or vice versa. Consider how much time you have and play it as best you can.

Explore moving in the tights. Be strict with your attention and clear with your intentions. Report (honestly or poetically) to the audience if you feel distracted, or are dropping one score or task to find another.

Fourteen A or B

Start to measure the space with your body. Go quickly, urgently, hungry for external guidance. As soon as you begin to indicate something, change, find something else to measure, match, indicate. Examples: Match arms, legs or torso to angles of walls, roof beams, audience seating. Match whole body length or angle to architecture, an audience expression, a mark on the floor or wall, follow the floor tape or an exit sign. Do this until you find something interesting to explore or repeat or a fresh impulse to follow.

Explore the space – the physical and social space. Climb something or get into the audience. In New York, I had asked for a light bar to be lowered towards the back of the stage. I used a square block to reach up and hang from it. In Germany I was lucky to be performing in a gorgeous converted barn with log beams (almost pillars) that I could climb between. Do something that expands y/our experience of the space. Stretch the idea of the theater, vertically or into the audience, or out a door or window, or even out of view of the audience. In Mexico, Germany, and New York my climbing was considered dangerous, even reckless by many (not all), in the audience. Calculate your risks and play within your range, stretching perceptual borders of ‘normal’ or ‘expected’ body, theater, dance, performance, space, time, presence.

Hopefully you can have a rehearsal in the space where you can see potential for climbing, testing the space. Asking permission in advance is more important in the US than in Europe and is more important in fancy theaters than in converted barns. I enjoy the space between provocation and building consensus. I like to include the presenters and the audience in the making, performing.

Fourteen A or B

Explore the space with sound. Talk, sing, sound as you wish. In Mexico I clapped my hands to test the resonance of the space and then I started singing (almost yelling) a loud tone. I played with changing my mouth shape to make a thick, polyphonic sound, filling the space and bouncing back into even more complex sound. The audience could really feel me, the room, themselves, the fusion of these. In New York (Dancespace, St Mark’s Church) I started growling louder and louder, pushing my voice and my relationship to the audience as far as I could, and in Chicago I sang a Christmas carol with equally intense broken (growling) tones. In Germany I didn’t do anything that tested the space sonically. Sometimes I’ll stomp my feet in loud, fast triplets.

Fourteen C

If you end up somewhere and want to reframe it with light, ask someone in the audience (or in a union space, ask a technician) to come on stage and re-position & re-focus the floor light(s). Sometimes a really magical ‘theatrical’ moment can be created. I love the tension/link between this magic and all the pomo, Brechtian, and anti-representational approach to performance and theater tech design.

Fifteen

Take off the tights and the dance belt (and anything else you might still be wearing: pearls, gauntlets, bra, optional items).

Put on sequined dress.

At this point you should have enough sensations in your body, awareness of breath, charged relationship with your environment – physical, energetic, audience, all – that you can just live, simply. Stand. Look. Fall down. Crawl. Walk. Talk. Sing. Dance. Don’t dance. Shake. Vibrate. Breathe. Roll.

Sixteen

You can always go back to mic, lights, reporting what you are doing or not doing, singing, exploring space, climbing, revisiting anything you’ve done before (including standing on one leg, testing limits of the body). If I notice that some spit has accumulated in my mouth, I tend to intentionally gather more and more, and then play with drooling, sucking, drooling onto the floor, or perhaps licking foot or hand or floor. Slowly drooling onto hand or floor, with spit illuminated by side or back light, is ‘magical’ even if also ‘gross.’ Spitting is of course optional. I’ve been playing/working with saliva – mine and others – since at least 1988 (Saliva). What have you been playing/working with?

Seventeen

You find or craft or decide the ending. You can decide by pre-determined length of time or by spontaneous decision. You can work with a cue from the light operator, or from a visible timepiece. In Mexico I wore a watch and ended at 31 minutes. I New York I said I’d go 45-50 minutes but I went 75. You don’t have to end in the dress. You can really follow or drive this performance to the conclusion you want.

[1] Mongrel: term adapted from Gulko, artistic director of Cahin-caha who uses the French word bâtard interchangeably with mongrel to describe his performance work. My mongrel is a bastard pup of dance, contact improvisation, circus, experimental theater, visual & conceptual art, theater design, lecture, performance & body art, site-specific art, stand up, Judson, Ridiculous, vaudeville, dance-theatre, music and sound art, public and activist art, object theater and more.

[2] Two references from a filmed interview with Simone Forti at Bennington.

I will bake a cake, as a dada-ish description for making a dance or happening. Balance an object and watch it fall, as a way to make a score for dancing.

[3] Remy Charlip – choreographer, children’s book author, healer. Charlip performed in early works of The Living Theater, was an original company member and costume designer with Merce Cunningham Dance Company, is the inventor of Air Mail Dances, the author and illustrator of numerous whimsical provocations for children, and has been deeply engaged in avant-garde dance, art, performance and somatics since the 1950s. He has lived in San Francisco for nearly 20 years. I relate to Charlip as my gay art uncle.

Illegal Bride (2005)

from Chosen (2004-05)

(Performed in recycled wedding gown with fetish details by Jack Davis, periodically drinking apple cider vinegar with a straw, gagging and drooling excessively, while standing on the fire escape of Dance Mission is a piss and junk alley off 24th St. in San Francisco.)

A piss and vinegar letter in honor of the dead world citizens
since September 11, 2001.
Dear George W Bush
Dear Mr Cheney, Mr Rumsfield, Dr Rice, Mr Wolfowitz, Mr Gonzalez,
Dear Mr. Bechtel, Mr. Chevron, Mr Lockhead Martin Mr Monsanto Mr Smart Bomb Mr & Ms New American Century
Dear Mr. Billionaire who doesn't pay taxes
Dear all you poor suckers, you grief stricken and fear frozen, overworked and underpaid, flag waving Americans who are so lost in your own pain that ...
Dear all of you. Fuck you.
I told you so
I told you so
I fucking told you so
I told you that war always kills children
I told you that there'd be no way to win this war
without bankrupting the US,
without destroying the hopes of our youth,
leading to more hungry, illiterate, and orphaned children
I told you so
I told you so
I fucking told you so
I don't want to talk about it
It hurts
It hurts that the killing continues
as I speak, as I drink, and even as I sleep
It hurts while the starvation and bad water continue
While the profits of Carlysle, Bechtel, Chevron, and Haliburton continue
It hurts while the profits of the Saudi and Kuwaiti royal families,
the Bush and Bin Laden royal families, the Fox and CNN royal families continue
While the repression of female power, education, community and health continues
Don't make me give all the details
You fucking know it
I told you so
I told you so
I fucking told you so
Everyone told you so
Even your own goddamned experts must have told you that most Iraqi citizens would never forgive the first Gulf War
All the cruel killing, war crimes and destruction of water treatment plants, pharmaceutical factories, and other essential services.
You are responsible for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children
and even more adults in the 10 years preceding 9.11 and yet you dare to brag, "We bring freedom to tortured souls!"
Meanwhile after 3 years of illegal imprisonment and torture there have been no convictions of Guantanamo prisoners! No terrorists found.
And the International Red Cross says that 70% of Iraqi prisoners in US custody were arrested by mistake, have no intelligence value, and will never be charged with anything, and yet you force them to suck each other off on camera.
You couldn't find a terrorist if you were looking in the mirror.
Instead of asking, "Why do they hate us?",
we should be asking,
"What will it take to disrupt America's fake-ass innocence and total denial of the crimes of the corporate state?
Crimes which we support every time we drive a car, lace up our sneakers, and eat an ear of corn."
I told you so
I told you so
I fucking told you so
I told you so
I told you so
I fucking told you so
I hate that revenge is culturally acceptable in Washington, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Hollywood, Ramallah, Jakarta, London, Beijing, Fruitvale and the Mission.
I hate the cynical tactic of terrorizing people into accepting the punishment of others, of accepting that entire nations are evil enemies to be violently contained.
Every war and occupation is based on the same fucked up logic that Hitler triumphed and that's why I name you all fascists.
I told you so
I told you so
I fucking told you so
With 15 million people in the streets on the same day I told you so
With the majority of the UN I told you so
But you don't seem to care about the UN.
What the fuck is the matter with you?
The entire hope of the UN is the promise of NEVER AGAIN;
of promising to the hearts ripped open with grief and betrayal that a liberation of body, soul and planet is possible blah blah blah
But you hate hope
What the fuck is the matter with you?
Over 3,000 humans died in the attacks of September 11, 2001
And since then you've killed more than 20 times that including 1400 US Soldiers, at least 3000 Afghani civilians and a minimum of 20,000 Iraqi civilians...*
How many need to die? How many need to lose a leg or an eye?
Your wounds cannot be healed by the blood of dead children.
Stop killing their babies!
Stop killing their babies!
Why are you so fucking cruel?
You don't fucking care about safety, about home, land, security?
You'll kill anyone anywhere just to make everyone more depressed, more afraid, more anxious, more likely to kill.
The more you kill, humiliate, and starve,
the more danger and terror you bring to your own home.
You're the number one inspiration for fundamentalist religious violence.
You have trained, funded, and armed terrorists.
You practically invented Al Queda.
You befriended and funded Saddam for years.
You collaborate with anti-democratic torturous regimes all over the world including Pakistan, Indonesia, China and Saudi Arabia.
You lied, you lied, you lied, and you lied again.
You're a bunch of mass murder war criminals who ought to rotting in a prison made just for wealthy cynics.
I told you so
I told you so
I fucking told you so
But you don't listen
You don't listen cuz I'm a drunk homo bride with no land to call my own
Yah you don't listen cuz I'm a drunk homo bride with no land to call my own and I confuse all the issues.
But I give up. You win.
Now fuck off and leave me alone.
PS. To all those gain grotesquely from Halliburton's pathological profiteering in Iraq, spending billions on US military bases and zero on hospitals, schools and homes, fuck you. And that includes Dick Cheney & Condi Rice, Halliburton's filthy rich thieving friends in the White House, and to Alberto Gonzalez who supplied the legal justification to torture anyone who gets in the way of those profits, fuck all of you.
PPS. And a special fuck you to each and every employee of the CIA for intentionally fucking up democratic hopes and movements from Guatemala to Guantanamo, from Haiti to Indonesia, from Iran to El Salvador. Instead of preventing 9/11 and catching your buddy Osama, instead of supporting peaceful uprisings to oppressive regimes, instead of feeding all the people and teaching the world to read, you're just a bunch of overpaid, dumb ass terrorists. Whatever. Fuck you too. Im out.

* (Iraq Body Count)

Mark Twain Preface (2005)

from Chosen (2004-05)

The next piece is by Mark Twain, and is called The War Prayer. In it, Twain suggests that every prayer has an unspoken twin, a shadow prayer that completes the first, warning us, to be careful what we pray for.

He wrote it a century ago in response to the invasion and occupation of the Philippines. In two short years, between 1899 and 1901, the US military, without airplanes, killed over 500,000 Philipinos in a program called Benevolent Assimilation, ushering in an era of political instability and subservience to US economic interests that has continued to this day, and been replicated in various countries around the world.

In the perverted genius we might call the American High School of Historical Revisionism we are not taught that the invasion and massacre in the Philippines ever happened, nor that their existed an Anti-imperialist League, of which all-American author Mark Twain was a member, that actively protested that war.

Twain said, "I have seen that we do not intend to free but to subjugate the Philippines. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the Eagle put its talons on any other land ... I have a strong aversion to sending our bright boys out there to fight with a disgraced gun under a polluted flag."*

This is the shadow prayer to “God bless our troops and make safe our home.”

*Twain cited by Philip Foner in the book, "Mark Twain: Social Critic", p. 260.