Artfully Bellying Up to the Bar Scene

The lights are down, but the audience at the Knitting Factory is still talking and ordering drinks. Onstage, the Dark Bob is dressed in a skirt, curled toe shoes and a black veil. He is ready to emcee the evening’s show.

But wait. His prerecorded announcements boom over the sound system while he struggles in vain to lip-sync. The small crowd quiets down, embarrassed that he apparently is messing up. He paces. He gestures. Then his own thoughts come through the speakers.

“Wait, what am I doing here? I’m talking too much,” he thinks. He can’t even furrow his brow in sync to his own thoughts. While there’s something surreal about all this, mostly it’s just very, very funny, and finally laughter fills the room. Yet another Los Angeles club audience has succumbed to the performance art antics of the Dark Bob.

Although Largo, the Viper Room and the late, lamented LunaPark booked performance artists for years, other nightclubs, including Arcadia, Genghis Cohen and the Mint, have started putting them on their rosters. Add to those the opening of the Knitting Factory--an L.A. version of the New York club that’s long been home to avant-garde performance. Now Ann Magnuson, Exene (formerly of the band X) and Andy Dick are among the celebrities jumping up on stages formerly reserved for rock bands and DJs.

It works out surprisingly well. Performance artists need audiences--and clubs can provide brand-new ones. These nightspots are far from the galleries, museums and other art spaces that historically hosted performance art, and they attract a different crowd.

The rise in national touring performance art groups has not gone unnoticed by local club owners, either. The success of Blue Man Group, Laurie Anderson and shows such as “Stomp” are indications that there is a new audience for performance art. Local performance artists, for their part, provide a little relief from the same old rock and mind-numbing dance music. Anyway, applause is the goal, and as any comic can tell you, atmosphere and alcohol go a long way in loosening up those clapping hands.

But performance art isn’t always about laughs. The Knitting Factory audience that so warmly received the Dark Bob was a bit cold to Lida Abdullah. The Afghanistan-born performer wore traditional Muslim robes and sat center stage with dirt and grease smeared on her face. She rubbed her face with rags and stones, all the while wailing about shelter, stones for shelter, this was a home, this was shelter.

Her act was at once horrifying and uncomfortable. It went on too long for some. There was no music, no light moment.

Granted, Abdullah is at the end of the performance art spectrum that doesn’t work well in a crowded bar. Artists such as Abdullah dare to ask an audience to think, which can be difficult under the influence. Yet while the audience squirmed through her act, chances are her stark imagery cut through the next day’s hangover.

As Sal Jenco, who books performance artists as opening acts at the Viper Room, points out, sometimes the acts that seem the greatest risks also bring the greatest rewards. He doesn’t worry much whether audiences at his Sunset Strip joint will accept similarly off-the-wall presentations.

“There are many different forms of expression, and I think it would be imbecilic to focus only on a few of those forms,” says Jenco. “We need to be able to investigate the many forms of expression that are genuinely inspired. A space is merely a floor and some walls. If you can create a dynamic energy in that space, it becomes undeniable at some point.”

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The Dark Bob, for one, is embracing nightclubs wholeheartedly. The grandson of Venice’s first police chief (he has his Venice police badge No. 1), he used to perform at Venice’s Beyond Baroque art space, which coincidentally sits on the site of the first Venice jail. Formerly part of art duo Bob and Bob (he was the dark one), the multitalented performer loves to make an audience laugh and finds that’s easier in a nightclub.

“I’m pumped up right now,” says the artist. “I’m encouraged that audiences are coming out to clubs. Like Rachel Rosenthal, I want to be the access person for performance art.” He has rounded up other local performance artists, including Jackie Apple, John Fleck and Linda Albertano, for shows at the Knitting Factory and Arcadia. Lately he’s also been recording a CD with actor Andy Dick.

Working nightclubs is different, he admits, from more traditional performance spaces.

“Club audiences are out for a good time, unlike art space audience members who are there to be challenged. But the club owners don’t have as much of a commitment to the scene. In a club, they have great sound, but they treat you like [expletive],” he says and laughs.

Dick has his own reasons for doing performance art in clubs. Having moved around the country with his military family, Dick learned early how to make friends quickly with humor. He found success on TV comedies, first “The Ben Stiller Show” and then “News Radio.” Still, Dick, 34, says, “I was never a stand-up.” He feels more at home in a club milieu.

“One of the first times I ever got up on a club stage, I stuck Maxi Pads all over a friend of mine. It was the beginning of my search for a ‘reaction’ rather than just laughter from an audience. I love the feeling of reacting to something and then going back and learning more about myself through those reactions. I like dangling the carrot. I think over the years I have woken up a lot people from a very deep sleep.”

But even if he’s not a stand-up, he’s also reluctant to call himself a performance artist. “It scares people,” he says. But what else do you call this recent exploit: Dick planted a pal in the audience who first pretended to be his drug counselor and then threw up fake vomit all over him. (Dick also insists that he finds such performances therapeutic.)

There is some crossover in the art-space and club crowds. Engineer David Salazar enjoys shows at Highways and clubs, and he says they aren’t any better, or any worse, for the new venue.

Regarding a recent Knitting Factory show, he said, “It was a typical hodgepodge of performance artists. Some boring, some average, with a few interesting gems. Most of the audience seemed like personal friends of the performers.

“When I go see performance art, I want to be surprised. I like to be forced to think. If I have a certain reaction to a piece, then I’ve learned something about myself. Even though I’m an engineer, I like edgy stuff.”

Not all clubgoers want edgy--and certainly not heavy--on their Saturday night out.

Jon Marr, a piano tuner from Pacific Palisades, laughed hysterically at the Dark Bob’s recent Arcadia show, “All-Stars of LA Performance Art,” but admitted the next day that it was partly the booze laughing.

“When I think back on it, I wasn’t that impressed,” he says sardonically.

Fleck was one of the NEA Four--a group of performance artists who were refused grant money from the National Endowment for the Arts because of the controversial nature of their shows. He performed at that Arcadia show--in his underwear. Long a staple on the Los Angeles performance art scene, Fleck combined video, prerecorded dialogue and live shtick. There was nothing, however, in Fleck’s loud, outlandish and very funny act that insulted or shocked this audience, so much so that it became difficult to envision him as an art radical. Born into rock ‘n’ roll, weaned on gross film comedies and now accustomed to hard-core rap and Marilyn Manson--among the clubgoing crowd, almost anything goes.

“In clubs,” he says, “you only get about 45 minutes to do a run-through and sound check. The motto is, ‘Keep it simple,’ because it gets crazy in clubs. Margaritas are being blended while you’re trying to talk. I always allow for improv in my club shows, because anything can happen. You gotta hit ‘em over the head in clubs to get them to pay attention. Art/theater audiences are fuller, and they pay attention more. But I have fun in clubs. People are rowdier and unpredictable, and I like that.”

The audience was definitely not rowdy when Jackie Apple and Julie Adler performed together recently at Arcadia. Julie stood motionless with a bucket on her head while Jackie recited a somber poetic litany. Not funny, not mean-spirited, the piece was a welcome change from all the slapstick that preceded it. Did the capacity crowd listen? You could hear a pin drop.

“At a time when so much media is virtual and flat, it is rather refreshing and exciting to provide and be a part of a live, breathing visceral art form such as performance art,” says Adler, a recent graduate of CalArts. “Nothing is as potent as human touch . . . period.”

Autobiographical monologues are an easy sell to any audience, and clubgoers are no exception. Working actors such as Simone Gad, Erika Schickel and Dan Froot are each engaging storytellers. Gad’s frumpy persona speaks volumes about beauty and self-image. Froot uses a plastic water bottle as a prop to talk about his father the inventor. Schickel describes a shopping trip with her two young daughters. These performers demand nothing beyond listening, and a few beers never got in the way of a good story.

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Some artists even adapt their performances for a drinking audience. Jerry the Priest’s “Sunday Lard Asylum” shows at the Knitting Factory, for instance, are heavy on music. Jerry, who dropped out of the performance art scene for years to travel the world, now uses what he learned on those journeys in his act. Often appearing in drag or other outlandish costumes and wigs, he incorporates Tibetan chant and often indecipherable lyrics in his show. He yells, he whispers, but always he entertains. He maintains a level of intensity that keeps the audience attentive.

Unclothed women have been know to get attention in clubs too, but usually not in the way Rochelle Fabb goes about it. Fabb is rolled onto the Knitting Factory stage in a wheelchair, draped with a sheer white fabric. Without speaking a word, she struggles against the white cloth, pulling it slowly and meticulously with hands that appear disabled. The audience is permitted to stare--an almost cathartic response that would not be socially acceptable if the scene were happening in the real world. After an agonizingly slow process, the white drape is finally removed to reveal a stripper’s body clad in pasties and G-string. The character is finally liberated, and so is the audience.

Composer-trapeze artist Stefanie Naifeh usually performs with her group Circus Sirius at the El Rey Theater and other large theatrical venues but adapts her act for smaller club stages quite easily. In the Dark Bob’s recent Knitting Factory show, “The Bountiful Women of L.A. Performance Art,” she and another acrobat dressed in bra and panties to sing little cabaret songs of love and money, accompanied by members of the avant-garde band Double Naught Spy Car. Club audiences respond enthusiastically to her naughty acrobatics--but her act would work anywhere.

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Husband-and-wife team Michael J and Abbe Abbe have been performing in L.A. clubs for more than 10 years as Tyrants in Therapy. At Genghis Cohen, Canter’s Kibitz Room and the Mint, the punk cabaret duo sings its original songs to a prerecorded soundtrack. Unlike most other performance artists, the Tyrants have made many records and CDs and found some commercial success on the dance club circuit. Like a twisted Steve and Edie, the Tyrants can be engaging and controversial. This is a group born on the club circuit that is riding the tide of interest in the genre.

And the wave isn’t crashing yet. Liz Garo, who books the Knitting Factory’s Alterknit Lounge, is committed to promoting performance art shows there in the next year. Although LunaPark has closed, other clubs are experimenting with performance art nights. And artist-promoters Jerry the Priest and the Dark Bob are on the prowl for new venues.

For them, clubs offer a welcome relief from the paperwork and rejection involved with traditional art spaces. Jerry the Priest tersely summed up his reason for playing clubs: “No [expletive] proposals.”

* Jerry the Priest hosts “The Last Chance North Pole Booty Review,” Dec. 24 at 8:30 p.m. at the Knitting Factory Main Room, 7021 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. $10 cover. (323) 463-0204.

The Dark Bob hosts “All-Stars of LA Performance Art--Part 5,” Feb. 5 at 8 p.m. at the Knitting Factory Main Room, 7021 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. $10 cover. (323) 463-0204.