ON BEING DEVIANT AND RESTORING THE BALANCE OF THE UNIVERSE
In contemporary Western culture the liminal space of the transformer, the oracle, the innovator, the deviant, the mystic, and the mad is often occupied by the performance artist.
We’re pleased to host two unique artists—Linda Mary Montano and Kestutis Nakas—on Plaza Blanca this Summer. They are both well known in the field of Performance. And both offer an opportunity for Some Serious Business to reconnect and collaborate with artists we worked with in the past who continue to comment on the human condition.
In 1977, SSB was operating in Los Angeles as an “alternative space” without a space, producing performances all around the city. Linda Montano was in town for the College Art Association conference which was being held in a downtown hotel. During the conference SSB produced a closed-circuit television program with David Ross as host (he was just starting to build a seminal video collection for the Long Beach Museum of Art). Linda was invited on the program. David and one of the beefy Kipper Kids were seated on a couch in our hotel room interviewing guests. Linda came on dressed in a nurse’s uniform and a woolen Peruvian cap. The “boys” (and believe me, they were acting totally juvenile) asked her what she’d been up to. She said she’d just returned from South America where she had learned a new technique called “Nasal Netty” and asked if they’d like to see it. They took the bait, at which point, Linda took a tube out of her pocket, inserted it her nose, and proceeded to run it back and forth through her nasal cavity and out both nostrils. It was hilarious: their macho posture disappeared, their mouths dropped open, they were speechless. A perfect theatrical moment.
Later, we hosted “A Day of Massage at Venice Beach” with Linda. It started to rain, and we all walked back to Hal Glicksman’s studio at 76 Market Street and spread out our blankets on the floor. Linda is a feminist provocateur whose work is at the service of healing and transformation. As people started to massage each other, you could feel their intense discomfort. Touching another person in this intimate way, in public, provoked strong emotions in the participants who were gradually transported into a powerful, shared space of intimacy and connection.
LINDA MARY MONTANO ARTIST STATEMENT
I am a performance artist and according to my mother I have always been “different.” Raised strict Roman Catholic, I wanted to be a priest but luckily found a way to do that via performance art and the fact that creating healing rituals and performative Holy Actions were possible in this genre.
My training was cultivated in San Francisco where my alter-ego, Chicken Woman was born. Having shown live chickens on the roof of the art building at the University of Wisconsin Madison, it was an easy evolution to move from collaborating with live chickens to becoming one myself. I chicken danced, chicken sat chicken sang and found a way to make ART OF EVERYDAY LIFE, EVERYDAY ISSUES, EVERYDAY TRAUMAS and by making art, I found I raised my everyday concerns into a new stratosphere: that is art made my life sacred and transformable and sometimes even humorous.
I taught performance, collaborated with Tehching Hsieh in his ART/LIFE ONE YEAR PERFORMANCE. We were tied together at the waist by an 8-foot rope for a year. I then performed a long endurance titled: 14 YEARS OF LIVING ART, an experience of getting to know the 7 chakras. I included many practices during these years and one was that I wore, each year, one of the colors of the chakra that I was enduring. I taught this methodology in an online school for many years in a performance titled; ANOTHER 21 YEARS OF LIVING ART.
Seven books, more than 60 videos, many performances, teaching, and a life that allows me to FIND CURES FOR MY WOES is my way.
May EACH find practices that bring us kindness/peace/wisdom and may each of us find appropriate ways of sharing our findings with those around us.
In ART=LIFE=LOVE, Linda Mary Montano 2020
KESTUTIS NAKAS
I first met writer/performer Nakas in 1983 at the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge at the height of the East Village Renaissance. The Pyramid was known for theatrical serialized extravaganza’s in the early evening on its tiny stage. Legendary visionary impresario, Bobby Bradley had recently hired me to do PR and he booked Kestutis to direct his version of fractured Shakespeare: Titus Andronicas. Billed as “Shakespeare’s worst play,” it is almost never performed. In this intimate, cabaret-style setting, Ann Magnuson, Steve Buscemi, John Sex, John Kelly and others who were to become legendary performers camped it up and died covered in stage blood. In one particularly bloody scene, a character’s arm (read giant bologna) was chopped off as Kestutis offered meat snacks to the audience. There were Meat-themed t-shirts and the whole back room of the club smelled like peanuts because of the quantity of Karo Syrup, red dye, and peanut butter that went into making the blood.
We spent every night at the club for several years, sharing the excitement of the drag and gender performances, fully realized spectacles, experimental music, dance, film and video, pseudo classical vaudeville, serialized theater, and cultural stew that was the Pyramid. Now, some 40 years later, Kestutis and I are collaborating on an oral history begun by our late, great friend Brian Butterick aka Hattie Hathaway, that traces the early days of the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge and the extraordinary people who flourished there.
KESTUTIS NAKAS: Artist Statement
In my solo performance works I often depict lovable but hubris-filled guys who set out for enjoyable escapes or new projects. These turn dark and nightmarish but are finally resolved in some comic or surprising way. There is usually an underlying zeitgeist-charged theme like feminism or widening class divisions. In Remembrance of Things Pontiac, a tripping fifteen-year-old “dude” at a 1970 rock festival encounters a frightened, naked, bad-tripping teenage girl saved by an improbable rescuer. In No Bees for Bridgeport an urban beekeeper is harassed by his blue-collar Chicago neighbors until his bees (a new and “savage” race) drive marauding real estate speculators from their south side neighborhood. For my newest work, I plan to reverse the scary old “dummy takes power from the ventriloquist” theme. In this new piece, the dummy will start out as a tyrannical domineering figure wielding power over a captive ventriloquist who must find a way to take power back and restore the balance of the universe.
Kestutis Nakas is a writer, performer, director, and teacher whose work has been presented at the New York Shakespeare Festival, Yale Rep, La Mama, Dixon Place, P.S. 122, St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, 8BC, The Kitchen, Highways, Prop Theatre and numerous other national venues. Performance works and plays include RIP, No Bees for Bridgeport, Railroad Backward, Remembrance of Things Pontiac, My Heart, My President, Hunger and Lightning, and The Andrew Carnegie Story. In the 1980s, he was active in New York’s East Village performance scene and was Artistic Director of Gates of Dawn, which showcased New York performers. He is a Professor of Theatre at The Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University in Chicago. In December 2017, he presented Channel D a new solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In June 2018, in honor of the centennial of Lithuanian independence, he presented a staged reading of all four parts of When Lithuania Ruled the World at HOWL Happening, New York City. Kestutis Nakas lives in Chicago with his wife and son.