Sensual
Healing
by Mark Hornburg
Writing
about the Centre for Transgressive Behaviors’ show last Friday night
at Trace Gallery in Raleigh is a no-win proposition. On one hand,
offering a watered down description of the unprecedented avant-garde,
multimedia event won’t do it justice. On the other hand, describing
it accurately could get the group shut down: The success of this
CTB show could be measured by how many laws were broken in one evening.
About 85 people with tickets were let into Trace between 11 and
11:30 p.m. before the doors were closed for good. With the gallery
safely sealed against intruders, the two uniformed cops leaning
against their vehicles directly outside were left to wonder what
exactly was going on inside the Blount Street building. They really
don’t want to know.
It’s
the only Triangle show of any sort I’ve been to after which I had
to immediately strip off my clothes upon returning home and throw
them in the wash. My clothes had been splattered with paint water,
sweat, fruit juice and other unidentifiable fluids, as had my sandals,
which I’d refused to “‘fess up” at the door. (Everyone else was
required to deposit their shoes in cardboard boxes.) My T-shirt
and shorts reeked of firecracker smoke and incense, and had picked
up the barnyard stench that eventually permeated a packed and steaming
hot building lined in part with straw. Outside later, I saw a full
moon haloed by a haze similar to the cloud of funk emanating from
Trace. Washing my clothes that night was like acknowledging a return
to domesticity after taking part in some urban- inflected, pagan
orgy.
Why
am I being so coy with the details? For one thing, the participatory,
improvisational, one-off event—which included live and pre-recorded
music, performance, dance (if you count unchoreographed tribal gyrations),
painting (of a sort) and probably even astral projection—is nearly
indescribable. Pieces of the event were staged simultaneously in
different open rooms, and the building was crowded, making it impossible
to see what was going on in each cell. In addition, it’s difficult
to tell how much of the show’s content is legally proscribed, putting
me in a tight spot as possibly the only member of the press allowed
in.
“Are
you a virgin?” one of the CTBers asked within minutes of my arrival:
shades of Rocky Horror. The building was full of non-virgins, people
who had been to several CTB happenings, who’d come with costumes
or loose clothing that could be removed with little effort, whenever
the mood hit them. But this was the first that I’d seen of the nine
events put on by the Centre for Transgressive Behaviors over the
last two years, and I felt like I’d been initiated into some sort
of private club. Reporting on the show is almost like ratting on
your brothers in the Masons.
Besides,
the CTB is headed by two guys you wouldn’t want to get into trouble.
Craig Hilton and Staffan Persson, the group’s impishly charismatic
leaders, wandered the building all night with the wicked smiles
of mad geniuses on their faces, Hilton wearing a paint-splattered
opaque poncho, football shoulder pads and shop goggles, while Persson,
soaked with water and paint, was stripped down to nothing but a
jock strap. After leading a large group of tribal wedding/dance
with a Trent Reznor-inspired score (performed by a core group of
CTBers from various local bands)—during which he fed grapes to the
revelers like some benign, dissipated Roman emperor—it was nothing
for Persson to stand about, beaming, in his locker-room attire,
and chat about the show.
“This
got a little messier than usual,” Persson says, with a slight Swedish
accent. He’s smiling broadly, the adolescent boy in him perversely
pleased with the mess he’s made. It looks like a Sherwin-Williams
factory blew up in here. We’re standing in a blue puddle, at a spot
where nude virgins were dragged mock-screaming toward the pentagram-decorated
Lokkenhaus for some sort of “sacrifice.”
When
the 28-year-old Swede isn’t researching avant-garde artists in order
to cull ideas for CTB shows, he’s busy working on a graduate degree
at N.C. State. Persson, who’s been in the United States for two-and-a-half
years, is allegedly responsible for the script or outline of this
event, but when I ask to see a copy, he admits there isn’t one.
“It was sort-of a free-for-all tonight,” he says, laughing. The
purpose of the shows, he says, is simply to enhance people’s creativity
and imagination. “People are stuck in front of their TVs too much,”
he concludes, then heads off for a much-needed bath.
“You
didn’t get it too bad, says Hilton, coming up to examine my clothes.
A stocky 27-year-old who teaches guitar at Bert’s Music in Cary,
Hilton has been staging these shows at different North Carolina
locations (this was the second show at Trace), and presiding over
a core group of CTB members numbering at any given moment between
10 and 30. The shows were originally based on his interest in experimental
music. “But you can see a band on stage any day of the week,” he
says. He wanted to do something more participatory, using a collective
of amateur actors and musicians from local bands. The band is the
centerpiece of the group, but Hilton tries to build on this to create
“surrealistic environments.” The previous show at Trace, he says,
included a flamenco procession and a man giving birth through a
huge phallus. An earlier show at Kings consisted of show trials,
gladiator fights, and a finale in which a giant pinata full of food
was beaten open by spectators wielding sticks.
What
does all this mean? Besides the orgiastic or tribal elements, this
night I’ve seen women on swings hitting each other with homemade
foam bats; a Trojan dinosaur; two men conveying a 20-foot long Dr.
Seussian trumpetlike device made out of plastic tubing and a funnel;
women in frozen poses over metal grates; a kind of mock magic show;
a knife-wielding robed figure wearing a beaked mask; and so on.
But I’m not quite certain this is what I’ve really seen, either.
Halfway through the night I find myself longing for some meaning-conveying
narrative to help pull it all together.
At
the end of the event, about the time I witness the tall, dark-haired
Persson feeding fruit to gyrating dancers, I’m approached by a painted
“virgin,” who hugs me and rubs my chest, leaving her colorful mark
on me. Despite the giant, red-tipped papier-mache phallus and breasts
bestriding the band’s stage, I realize that the point is not sexuality,
but sensuality. While the sexual content is self-consciously adolescent
and performed with a wink, the show’s sensuality is palpable and
profound, and manifested in all its seemingly random formal aspects.
The participants are as comfortable in their bodies as ravers jacked
on ecstasy, but without the drugs, and in a tight environment that
encourages a ’60’s-style communality. Even mere onlookers feel the
charge off these surroundings. While the artistic value of the show
may be dubious, its experiential value is undeniable. As far as
its meaning goes? Well, I’m just praying it doesn’t mean jail time
for its unconventional creators.
(This
article appeared in The Independent
Weekly in the May 24-30, 2000 issue.)
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