LACE’s School for the Imagination

For four sweaty weekends, grown men and women ran screaming across a room, beat their bodies upon floors, battered a giant cardboard toothbrush, fondled a giant cardboard teapot, chewed a giant cardboard dog-bone, and--among other equally curious behaviors--howled with hysterical laughter. At one point, people even threw themselves into the arms of onlookers, a la Superman diving out of a tall building.

Primal group therapy, L.A. style? Not exactly.

These seemingly demented antics were actually rigorous class assignments during the first “School of Continuing Education of the Avant-Garde,” four July workshops sponsored by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

Students came to the sessions in the LACE performance gallery downtown aware that performance art is a demanding discipline, but they soon learned the extent to which pain precedes art.

Although the seminars--led by the Shrimps, Blue Palm, Goat Island and Simone Forti--differed in method, each taught that the paring away of inhibition must accompany discipline.

“It’s the dynamic of letting your imagination go,” said Blue Palm’s Jackie Planeix between classes, “and having the intelligence and consciousness to control what you’re doing.”

Knowingly or not, these “professors of performance” and their students were echoing Jean-Paul Sartre’s conviction that “in order to achieve authenticity, something has to snap.”

Snap went preconceptions during the four-hour Saturday/Sunday workshops for each class’s dozen or so men and women. Most of the students were themselves performers, dancers and artists, such as popular local performance artist John Fleck who described the sessions as a “disconnecting and assimilating” experience.

“I was exhausted, torn apart, vulnerable,” he said with satisfaction. “I put in the effort and my defenses were gone.”

The opening seminar was led by the self-described group of “large men and small women” known as the Shrimps who accent gender clashes and an ironic visual humor.

Childlike simplicity was the Shrimps’ ideal. Students hopped, bounced and crafted oversized household objects from cardboard and spray-paint to discover what 6-foot-plus Shrimp Steven Nagler characterized as “moving in certain spaces with certain ideas in mind, moving with objects and putting those (ideas, spaces) together.” The Shrimps then led their students into mini-performances around found objects and “hexes.”

The Blue Palm team of Tom Crocker and Jackie Planeix chose, like the Shrimps, to emphasize an “aesthetic of play,” according to Planeix. Vocal and physical calisthenics ranged from yogic to frenetic, helping participants overcome the tensions that stand in the way of using “the body and voice as a complete tool,” she said.

“Rather than tacking on tricks,” Crocker said, “we prefer to get down to some connected root. (The technique of unifying body and voice) is not a hat you put on.”

Goat Island members Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish based their class on a dialectic of what Hixson called “theory and physical working” that, although different from the movement-orientation of the first two weekends, nonetheless continued the school leitmotif of stripping away in order to build.

Class began with a discussion of the sociopolitical context of art-making, but soon the instructors encouraged students to stop intellectualizing and, in Hixson’s words, “let go of personalities and interests in order to work.”

Writing exercises involving personal history grew into collaborative performances, maintaining the dialogue between intuition and social awareness, or what Hixson described as “exercises that let us be stupid again” while “taking responsibility on all levels.”

The final weekend was led by post-modern dancer Simone Forti, whose work since 1970 has stressed what she calls “natural movement,” based in part on her observations of animals. Interactive group improvisations helped uncover the inner source of movement while working toward a connectedness not unlike that sought by Blue Palm.

Student Margaret Tedesco, who attended three of the four weekends, compared the workshops to traditional dance classes. “I’ve been dancing almost 20 years,” she explained, “and half of this (performance work) doesn’t get taught.

“Other instructors only ask you to mimic or look at a picture and reproduce it on your body; nobody talks about what you’re feeling while you’re doing it.”

The workshops, Tedesco ventured, went beyond such externals, leaving students with “a gestalt experience, (integrating) all of these elements and (encouraging us to) have an ‘intelligence’--an extrasensory sense--to oversee and motivate us into an authentic direction.”

But “that’s not one process,” said Tedesco. Then she defined the subtext for all of the workshop: “You can’t divorce your daily self from whatever you do in there.”