Skip to main content"Something unusual happens at these shows," says Lisa Newman, co-director of 2Gyrlz Performative Arts' annual EnterActive Language Festival. "People start and end relationships at them. Or they rush home afterwards and immediately have to paint or write or conceive children. It's happened!"
Newman is not exaggerating. In a town in which boundary-bashing behavior is practically de rigueur, the E-L Fest ventures several steps beyond envelope pushing, forging into realms where sensory overload and transgressive thought converge. If audience members enter actively, they just as often exit creatively or, as the case may be, procreatively. Now in its third year, the festival is the brainchild of Newman and 2Gyrlz co-founder Llewyn Máire, who together have transubstantiated a shoestring budget ($5,000) and the dedication of 30 volunteers into Portland's most daring arts festival. With curatorial finesse to burn but only a fraction of the resources (and bureaucratic baggage) of higher-profile local festivals, the E-L Fest has risen above its modest means to become the little festival that could.
There is something refreshingly radical about the fest's international convocation of rogue artists. Past years' highlights have included a hip-hop call to arms from scorching FTM rapper Katastrophe; an affecting coming-of-age confessional by a group of local queer youth; audience-accosting Chekhov channeling by Pete Kuzov and Edie Tsong; Newman's own haunting performance piece at Disjecta, in which she emerged, ignudo but painted as a skeleton, from a clawfoot tub to deliver a wordless monologue on death; and the Porno-Social Ritual of gonzo Frenchman Jean-Louis Costes, which was either the nadir of bad taste or the apotheosis of polymorphous perversity, depending on your stance on anilingus, labial bloodletting, golden showers, and the creative desecration of the cross of Calvary. Thankfully, miraculously, the E-L program--more than 20 performances over a month's span--is more than just a bazaar of the bizarre. In all but a few unfortunate cases, a solid conceptual base underlies the provocation.
Says Máire: "We don't invite people to a performance just so they can be shocked or walk out afterwards not understanding what they've seen. We're not about being Gallagher. We want people to think about the idea that art is a language for exploring politics, ritual, gender, the media and how we interact with our bodies."
Among the performers who will explore these ideas during this year's fest are trans activist Kate Bornstein, film director Kirk Kelley, and Transformium, a multimedia troupe whose members will create live music as ritual suspensions take place (people suspending themselves from meat hooks for a spiritual, endorphic rush).
"Some of the audience will think it's gross," predicts Newman, "and some will have seen this sort of thing before and be jaded, but others will have a deep, empathetic experience with the person being suspended. Some people start shaking when they see it. It's going to be a very intimate show, with the feeling that you were invited to this sacred space, not that it's a public performance."
Prolific author and sex-gender-S&M activist Pat Califia is flying up from San Francisco to do a performance piece very different from his typical readings, and Joshua Camozzi Milligan will provide trippy soundscapes for "The Language of Alpha Wave," which will be held at OMSI. "Alpha Wave" will synchronize music and planetarium visuals designed to induce an alpha-wave state of "waking dreams," equally suited for zoning out or focusing inward.
There are two final factors that set this year's fest apart from previous outings. First, it's the penultimate year of E-L's four-year run--the Gyrlz are adamant about shutting the thing down before it loses momentum or integrity. Secondly, the fest's schedule encompasses the presidential election. "Miss Capitalism came two years ago," says Máire, referring to San Francisco performer Alexis McKee, who performs Nov. 2, "and she's going to be coming back this year and absolving our capitalist sins on the day the fate of the world is decided. I think there's a heightened need, whenever the political atmosphere is tense, for people to get hyped up or even angry at a performer. There's so much polarization, politically, in our country now, that it's even more important to do all the basic things humans do: eat, have an identity, have sex, express ourselves--not only in defiance of the current administration but regardless of what happens on Election Day."
2Gyrlz Performative Arts' EnterActive Language Festival At various venues through Nov. 28. See full details at www.2Gyrlz.org .
WWeek 2015