Big Goddess Returns for 2009

BY Kerry Reid

Twenty years ago, when the South Loop was still gritty and a guy named Bush was still president, a group of women got together at the now long-gone Edge of the Lookingglass, a gallery and performance space on 13^th Street that was also the home base for a group of recent Northwestern University graduates who had just formed their own company.

Individually, the women all came out of different traditions, from solo performance, slam poetry, stand-up comedy, music, and various combinations thereof. Collectively, they were, in the view of monologist/actor Paula Killen, who roped them all together for that first show, goddesses of the fringe scene. And thus the Big Goddess Pow Wow was born.

Over the past two decades, the Goddesses have gathered from time to time to spread their brand of fractured truth telling, most notably in a series of high-profile gigs at the Metro, where they held their own on a stage more used to rock and roll excess. They’re back in a special reunion show at this year’s Rhino Fest, and that’s good news, whether one is an old nostalgia hound for the glorious Chicago performance scene of the early ’90s (ahem) or just interested in seeing unique artists who too rarely show up onstage, either singly or collectively.

The last Pow Wow was in 2003. Both Killen and fellow goddess Marcia Wilkie, a solo performer and comedian, relocated to Los Angeles several years ago to pursue different opportunities in the entertainment industry—the latter has become a go-to writer for Marie Osmond. Lisa Buscani, one of the original cast members of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind and former National Poetry Slam champion, took off for Brooklyn and national tours of Late Nite Catechism, returning a few years ago to Chicago and her home with the Neo-Futurists.

In addition to Killen, Wilkie, and Buscani, the lineup for this 20th-anniversary show, puckishly entitled Big Goddess Pow Wow: From the Ashes, includes folkie Naomi Ashley, performance poets C.C. Carter and Cin Salach, solo performer/singer/actor/writer (and co-founder of the Curious Theatre Branch, producers of the Rhino) Jenny Magnus, and soloist and vet of “This American Life” Cheryl Trykv. Annoyance’s doyenne Susan Messing hosts.

But though some of the performers may pull out old favorites, don’t expect a greatest-hits show. “When we were younger, we were shouting to be heard,” says Buscani. “Now you find different ways to make a point that is equally effective.”

Killen made her mark with so-funny-it-hurts shows (such as her early ’90s hit Music Kills a Memory) about women in states of distress, whether brought on by chemical excess, romantic distress, or other factors that can throw the soul into agitation. She has brought her own work back to Chicago from time to time (including Sweet Ride at the Annoyance in 2007, with her old friend Karol Kent and director Messing), and she still considers this to be her home.

“When we were young, we were lucky,” she says of the connections she made here. “I met Brigid [Murphy, creator of performance extravaganza Milly’s Orchid Show] and Marcia Wilkie and Cheryl Trykv all in the same week after moving to Chicago. It’s great to have a lifelong experience with them and a body of work that you can admire, but I also want to see what people are doing outside my circle.”

Carter, who is a former Lambda Award nominee and the executive director for Young Chicago Authors, is making her Big Goddess debut in this show. “It’s in all of our best interests to span the globe generationally and in terms of experience and all that stuff,” says Killen. Guest artists across the generations have been part of past Pow Wows—the legendary Gwendolyn Brooks, onetime poet laureate of Illinois, joined them for a show in 1994.

The Big Goddess Pow Wows always had a great sense of fun and mischief to them. Killen remains particularly fond of one show when performance artist Joan Dickinson, who has also taught performance studies at School of the Art Institute, came out with a tree branch protruding from her backside like a tail. But they also grew out of the conflicts of the era; the NEA Four, when four solo artists, including Karen Finley and Holly Hughes, lost their NEA funding because of the explicit nature and politics of their work, anger over the first Gulf War, the ascendance of the Christian right and its influence on social policy.

“We came out of a very very repressive environment where we didn’t fit,” says Buscani. “We came out of a massive number of disciplines—comedy, poetry, music, conventional theatre—and I don’t know that that emphasis on other disciplines blending to make a new and different thing is at the forefront this time.”

Killen, who teaches writing and performance in Los Angeles and who has just sold a screenplay to Will Ferrell based on one of her stage pieces, finds that one thing that hasn’t changed in Chicago is the sense of community fostered by artists here (a community that has long been championed by the Rhino, it must be noted). In L.A., says Killen, “the solo work is showcase. I did the Comedy Central workspace and the HBO workspace. I was considered an oddity. I came out of a tradition of entertainment first and foremost, but the work I was doing wasn’t one-dimensional. Often, I didn’t know exactly where it was headed myself.”

One common element for all the women’s work, according to Killen, is that “most of us are romantics. I don’t know if it’s being women of a certain age or if it’s what drew us together. We were all interested in similar things and then wanted to see how the other person would react to it and regurgitate it on stage. We were trying to figure out how to live and love with this new ‘equality.’ We were the first generation that really had to deal with that question.”

The Goddesses have never put restrictions on each other, and they often don’t know what the other women will be performing. “If we booked a date like May Day or something like that, we’d come up with some kind of theme like ‘Loose Lips Sink Ships’ or the military, but it never worked out the way we wanted it to,” says Buscani. “We get there and ask, ‘Can you tell me what kind of tone your piece is?’ Naomi usually has humorous, twisted stuff, so I know putting a dark piece in front of her wouldn’t work.”

Says Killen, “I do believe that my work is a long-running conversation, so more than anything I look forward to continuing this conversation with my friends. I’m looking forward to feeling that Chicago vibe.”

And though the inauguration of Barack Obama may have ushered in a new era of hopefulness, Buscani says, “Although I think we’re making progress, we have so much work to do, so much ground to regain. It is necessary to keep hope in the forefront and cast a progressive eye on the future. How that affects us [as artists], I don’t know. We’ve always been hopeful people. By nature, I think artists take the saddest stories and find a way to comment on them, and just being able to comment on a sad thing or an unjust thing is a joyful thing. We all need a little joy right now.”

“Big Goddess Pow Wow: From the Ashes” plays Saturday, Feb. 7 at Acme Arts, St. Paul’s, 2215 W. North Ave. Doors open at 7, show is at 8. Tickets are $20 at 773-296-6024. For complete Rhino Fest info, visit www.rhinofest.com.