BY LUCIA MAURO
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Deformed rubber frogs get pelted across an elastic performing space that seems to metaphorically shrink and expand at will. A gaunt man plants a seed on top of his dirt-smothered shaved head. One man orders another to chug a tall glass of milk. A woman, in a state of blissful resolve, stands under a shower of insecticide. And at calculated intervals within this 105-minute presentation, the four artists engage in a madly repetitive jumping movement that appears to propel the toxins from their bodies.
These were the images that continued to weave through my mind days and weeks after Goat Island Performance Group re-mounted its 1998 production of The Sea & Poison, directed by co-founder Lin Hixson, last month at the Wellington Avenue Church’s gymnasium (where the 13-year-old company is based). Working from specific images of poisoning–environmental, social, emotional, psychological–that have spanned the 20th century, this erudite and heartfelt arts collaborative extended its ideas to a disturbing, comic and eloquent playing field of universals.
The experience was quite a revelation for me. I felt as though the performers’ agony and exhaustion were transferred to me; yet the pain was like the kind that follows a really good workout. At the same time, my brain cells and emotions were stretched across the terrain of a vast social contamination–the poisoning of Hamlet’s father; brutal dance marathons of the 1940s and equally taxing excerpts from 1945 Camay soap radio advertisements; the 1957 film The Incredible Shrinking Man; and James Joyce’s "The Dead."
Four athletic Goat Islanders–Karen Christopher, Matthew Goulish, Mark Jeffery and Bryan Saner clad in Cynthia J. Ashby’s industrial-outdoor wear–tapped into all the senses. They handed audiences a fiendishly confounding puzzle that I just may be piecing together for the rest of my life. "It’s not important that you get it," says Hixson referring to the Goat Island aesthetic. "It’s important that there’s a lot of resonance going on."
The Sea & Poison was sparked by ensemble member Saner, who was bit by a small animal while camping in the Grand Canyon. After his arm turned a violent purple-red, he engaged in a strenuous hike until his sweat drove out the poison. This image sparked research into the Tarantella and the Saint Vitus Dances of Italy. In a book on Goat Island’s intricate process, Hixson details–with charts and diagrams–the creation of a series of "impossible dance" prompted by an image and a phrase from a text. Besides the dances, they researched events involving poison in all forms.
Ironically Goat Island–while it boasts a loyal following–is not well known in Chicago. One of the main reasons is that this company of multidisciplinary artist-educators spends at least two years developing its evening-length experimental works. Another has to do with the troupe’s extensive national and international touring schedule. In fact, Goat Island performs at Penn State University this month and New York’s The Kitchen in November.
Shortly after its inception, the company decided to extend its reach beyond Chicago. After sending out a mailing to 60 presenters in Europe, they received responses from Leicester, England and Glasgow, Scotland. Each of its six completed pieces premiered in Chicago. And Goat Island has taken them across the United States to England, Scotland, Wales, Belgium, Switzerland, Croatia, Germany and Canada.
Goat Island, which consists of the above-mentioned artists and manager CJ Mitchell, vigorously promotes collaboration. Members contribute to the conception, research, writing, choreography, documentation and educational demands of the work. According to Hixson, the company aims to establish a spatial relationship with the audience beyond the usual proscenium theatre. They perform a personal vocabulary of movement, both dance-like and pedestrian, that often makes extreme physical demands on the performers and attention demands on the audience. They weave historical and contemporary issues through text and movement. Performances are consciously low-tech.
Most of the artists have backgrounds in visual art, film and music, and teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They are also published writers. In addition to small grants from the NEA and Illinois Arts Council, Goat Island cites teaching as another avenue for financial support.
"There is this idea of an integrative approach to art making," says Hixson. "We teach and that tends to bring a young audience to our work. We also are not interested in pursuing commercial film or TV. We’re really interested in live performance."
With education and community involvement a large part of its mission, Goat Island recently began free performance workshops for the children enrolled in the Broadway Children’s Daycare Center at the Wellington Avenue Church gymnasium in Lakeview. Last year, a 25-minute documentary on Goat Island was telecast locally (WYCC) in the series of "A World of Art: Works in Progress" as part of the Truman College arts curriculum. Penn State Professor Charles Garoian devoted a chapter of his book "Performing Pedagogy" to Goat Island’s educational methods.
In 1999, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago produced the first U.S. Goat Island Summer School, a three-week study of performance, collaboration, documentation and research for 30 participants. Previously, the company presented a two-week summer school in Bristol, England. It hopes to continue these workshops on an annual basis.
Goat Island’s full-length works are Soldier, Child, Tortured Man (1987); We Got a Date (1989); Can’t Take Johnny to the Funeral (1991); It’s Shifting Hank (1993); How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies (1996); and The Sea & Poison (1998).
The company is now developing It’s an Earthquake in My Heart, which Hixson describes at this early stage as being about the human body and its relationship to machines and technology. But don’t expect a conventional diatribe against the emotional detachment forged by computers. Goat Island’s genre-traversing references span car-chase sequences from TV movies, Butoh, the idea of memory as a phantom and the compression of time.