“When Your Friends Are Dying, You Damn Well Better Be Paying Attention”
On the floor of the US Senate in 1994, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina) decried underground, queer, and politically progressive performance artist Ron Athey as nothing more than a cockroach, an inflammatory statement, which captured the deep political divides rending the country apart in the late 1980s and 1990s. Helms’s remarks came in the wake of a performance Athey, along with collaborators Julie Tolentino, Darryl Carlton (aka Divinity Fudge), and Pigpen, gave at Patrick’s Cabaret in Minneapolis that same year. The performance, presented by the Walker’s Performaning Arts Department, drew national attention following a series of news articles that served to stoke national fears around the HIV/AIDS epidemic and contracting the virus (Athey is HIV-positive).
Performance artists like Athey, as well as a host of other radical and queer artists like Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, Ron Vawter, and David Wojnarowicz, found themselves central to debates about the country’s moral future, as the culture wars raged and the death toll from AIDS rose. In response to this contentious atmosphere, many artists allied to form lose communities and networks of exchange, experimentation, and mutual support, using performance to tell stories about their experiences, mining intimate details of their lives to get at larger issues affecting the country. The exhibit, A Different Kind of Intimacy: Radical Performance at the Walker, 1990–1995, focuses on the time period, displaying materials from the Walker’s archives and Permanent Collection. This new installation in the Walker’s Best Buy Aperture draws links between artists active in Los Angeles, New York, and Minneapolis and reveals how the era’s political issues and aesthetic experiments drew artists together.
The following is an excerpt from a wide-ranging conversation between Patrick Scully and Gwyneth Shanks, curator of A Different Kind of Intimacy. Shanks recently sat down with Scully, a longtime performer, presenter, curator, and activist in Minneapolis, to discuss his collaborative 1995 performance piece Unsafe, Unsuited featured in the exhibit, his role as the founder of Patrick’s Cabaret, and the broader aesthetic and political landscape of the US in the early 1990s, as the cultural wars and the HIV/AIDS epidemic raged.
Gwyneth Shanks (GS)
Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I wanted to begin by asking you how you got involved with the Walker—and with John Killacky, curator of Performing Arts from 1988 to 1996, in particular.
Patrick Scully (PS)
John was always very matter of fact about wanting to work with local artists. It’s smart for audience development and for lots of other business-like reasons, as well as for aesthetic and ethical reasons. In my memory, for the first Out There there was a late-night showcase. I remember auditioning: it was early December, and it was bitter cold outside, and I was showing this piece called Too Soon Lost that I was really still creating. The first people who were going to see it were going to be the people at the audition in the Walker auditorium. The piece was a combination of telling stories of friends who’d died in the AIDS epidemic and alternating that with buildings on Hennepin Avenue between 6th and 7th Street [Block E in downtown Minneapolis] that got torn down for the renovation of Block E [recently renamed Mayo Clinic Square]. So, I’d talk about a friend and a building and a friend and building, and, meanwhile, in the background, I played a time-lapse film I’d made of the block being demolished. I actually played the film in reverse because it was too sad to finish the piece with everything gone. I had just talked about all these buildings and all these people who are now dead and now the buildings. At least when the film ended, you could see Block E again how it was. It was somehow hopeful.
GS
Although equally sad.
PS
I just decided to pull out all the stops for the audition. “Okay, I’m going to play “Adagio for Strings” in the background because this is the saddest material that I know and that’s the saddest music I know.” I remember showing it, and when I finished there was dead silence. And the artist part of me was like, “Oh, my God. Was this just the most self-indulgent thing that anybody has ever seen, or are people moved to profound silence, or what’s going on? I don’t understand this silence.” The next day, John contacted me and said, “You know, I have to give a talk. It’s supposed to be the opening talk for the Arts Over AIDS conference that’s happening in the Guthrie Theater Lab.” And he’s like, “I would like you to do that piece as the prelude to my talk.” So I said, “Oh, okay. It must have been okay.” [Laughter]
GS
I can understand that reaction. Just hearing you describe the score of the work, it sounds quite beautiful.
PS
I think there was this weaving that happened between John’s curatorial choices in terms of bringing artists dealing with this kind of material from other places and its impact on the artists here who had an inclination to do that kind of work also.
GS
It’s been very interesting to go through the Walker’s archive for this period. There’s this exciting moment of John coming to the institution in ’88, ’89, and all of these programs starting within a few years of each other. Cultural Infidels: Film and Performance for Consenting Adults happened in January 1990, which is now the month that Out There happens, and then, a few years later, Dyke Night starts. It’s this really fertile moment for programming and also for artistic practice. Artists like Ron Vawter, Karen Finely, Guillermo Goméz-Peña, and Ron Athey, who performed at your space, Patrick’s Cabaret, are all in the exhibit.
PS
I actually didn’t see Ron’s performance. He came and saw Keith and Ishmael and me perform Unsafe, Unsuited [a collaborative, improvisational dance piece Scully co-created with dancers Keith Hennessy and Ishmael Houston-Jones, which premiered as part of Out There in 1995] at PS 122 in New York City, and that’s where I first met him. But my partner at the time and I had actually gone to Australia to be at the gay carnival in Sydney. John was my upstairs neighbor at the time, and he had talked with me months before about Ron coming. And I said, “Yeah, sure.”
GS
Had you ever seen Ron’s work before?
PS
No. But I simply thought, “Anything I can do to support another queer artist.” Patrick’s Cabaret was not a nonprofit at that point. It was just something I did out of my checkbook, so I didn’t have to get anybody’s permission or answer to anybody for it. I just did stuff.
GS
What was the fallout after Ron’s performance?
PS
Well, the interesting part of it was, for me—and this was a part that Jesse Helms and his crew never found out about. So, one of my radical fairy friends, White Ash, was doing administrative stuff for me at Patrick’s Cabaret at the time. So, while I’m out of town in Australia, he comes to work, and there’s this news crew waiting outside. And a reporter says, “Are you Patrick of Patrick’s Cabaret?” And he said, “No, he’s in Australia.” He says, “Oh, who are you?” And he says, “I work for Patrick.” So the reporter says, “Do you mind if we ask you some questions?” And White Ash said it seemed like what they were really trying to get him to say is if it was true that gay safe-sex parties happened in the basement. And he knew, of course, that it absolutely was, but he was not going to go there with them because he was savvy to what was going on in the press. He realized this would not be helpful information for the greater world to have at that point in time. Now, this many years later, I’m not concerned about it. I’m sure had that come out, the health department would have been there and closed everything down, and I’d have lost my apartment and who knows what else would have happened.
GS
Reading through the folders in the Walker’s archive on Athey’s performance, it’s really interesting to track how the controversy that erupted following his developed. It’s amazing how the narrative surrounding the performance changes so quickly from a very small-scale performance, to one that might have put audience members at risk of contracting HIV, to one that was “obscene” and used monies from the National Endowment for the Arts. I have a sense of how the Walker dealt with the situation, which was to not back down from supporting Athey’s artistic work. When you got back from Australia, what did Patrick’s Cabaret do?
PS
My main concern was to make sure that it was always said that this performance happened at Patrick’s Cabaret, because it would be very easy for history to mistakenly remember this as a performance that happened at the Walker Art Center, and then a very important link is missing to this queer-oriented performing space. And so my response was just, “Hey, bring it on—all the notoriety, all the attention, whatever that we can get from this—I have nothing to lose.”
GS
Did the community members who frequented Patrick’s Cabaret—artists, audience members—did their response shift?
PS
Patrick’s Cabaret, by that point, had been around eight years: so not that long. It was still more underground than above the radar, and I feel like a lot of local artists and audiences, if there was any fallout from it for Patrick’s Cabaret, it was positive. It all just reinforced our role in the community and its importance and the potential for what alternatives spaces can mean.
GS
What drew you to art? To dance?
PS
I was a freshman at the University of Minnesota, and I was going to get a Bachelor’s in Biology and go to medical school. [Laughter] Somebody said to me at some point, “Patrick, if you ever get the chance, you should take a modern dance class. I bet you’d really like it.” So in spring quarter of my freshman year I took a modern dance class, and I really liked it. When I finished in 1976, I graduated with my double major in Biology and German, I decided I would just keep dancing and see what happened. So it was really kind of chance that I even ended up in a dance class. I didn’t really know much about dance, but somebody had made that comment and I just thought, “Oh, that sounds interesting. I should check that out.”
GS
Somehow it stuck. So I’ve watched the video we have of Unsafe, Unsuited, and it’s all improvised, right? What about improvisation seemed to be the format to use for that work?
PS
There’s something about the artistic freedom of improvisation, to not recreate a moment but to just really be in the moment. It is a huge challenge and intimidation but also an enormous opportunity, so we made the commitment that we would improvise every show completely,no choreography at all. The closest we had to any choreography was that there were a few phrases—and by that I mean maybe, at most, 60 seconds worth of material all added together—that we had done a few times, that would sometimes morph and appear in some related form in another show. But it would be sort of like a little riff of a song woven into a jazz improvisation. And I think for us it was really the challenge and the opportunity to be there with each other as gay men, in this moment, locally and globally, particularly in terms of what was happening in the gay community.
GS
How did the rehearsal process work? Were there conversations in the rehearsal process around what the scope of the piece would include?
PS
No. The rehearsal process had basically two components. One was figuring out what should we do when we rehearse. [Laughter] And then the other was, “Okay. Now, let’s do it.” The main thing that we would do is get together and say, “Okay, let’s just dance for now and see what happens.” And that would generally be about as much direction as we would have. So when the actual show happened, these three spotlights that became standard for the show were on. We would each be all alone in a spotlight, and we didn’t know where it would go to from there. That was as much as we knew. But we didn’t say, “Well, we’re going to talk about this or we’re going include this as content,” or whatever. We obviously had all improvised and had a lot of thoughts and experience with improvisation. Little things would reappear: Ishmael’s hand in Keith’s mouth. Things like that sort of become vocabulary, but they’re not, any of them, developed enough that they would be choreography. It was a starting point, like beginning in a suit, white shirt, and tie: “Okay, it’s likely that at some point some of the clothes will come off and go back on, but there was no plan as to how that would happen.”
We would take turns guiding the rehearsal process. Sometimes we’d collaborate on ideas for the rehearsal process. And I remember early on, Ishmael—we were rehearsing in San Francisco and he was directing—asks, “Can we go through this list of questions?” If your answer was yes to a question, you went to one end of the room, and if your answer was no, you went to the other end of the room. He had all of these questions, like, “Have you ever been on public assistance?” “Are both of your parents alive?” Just any kind of question in the world as a way of seeing how each of us was similar to and different from the other two people in the room. We went through a lot of different kinds of improvisational exercises with each other to explore some of that background, and develop a sense of connection between the three of us.
GS
Watching it—even this kind of grainy footage—there’s such a level of trust between the three of you. How did you connect with Keith and Ishmael?
PS
Well, I knew of both of them. I had met Keith before other times that I’d been in San Francisco and seen him probably perform with Contraband. I knew of Ishmael. I don’t know that I’d actually seen Ishmael perform. But the dance world isn’t that big. When you shrink it down to the contact improvisation world—
GS
It gets smaller. [Laughter]
PS
—and then you shrink it to out gay men, it starts to get small enough that there’s only a handful in North America. There were a couple other people that I had also contacted, but Keith and Ishmael were both in from the very beginning, so we just decided, “Let’s do it as a trio.” In the beginning, we did a lot of writing back and forth, and email was sort of in its infancy in those days, and so we’d do a lot of free writing and then just send each other copies of what we were free writing—all by way of just getting to know and understand each other a little better.
GS
That is something that’s so meaningful about improvisation. You’re seeing trust—or its lack—happen on stage in front of you, which can be such a vulnerable position to put yourself in as a performer. Watching as an audience member, you feel that kind of vulnerability happening in real time. That notion of trust or vulnerability seems so important for the political and personal context of the work.
PS
As I was looking at this clip, I’m thinking to myself, “Okay. So I’m 41. Ishmael’s a yearor two older than me, so he’s maybe 43. Keith’s a couple of years younger than me, so he’s like 39 or almost.” So, we’re all in the middle of middle age. We’ve all been doing work either related to this or building up to this for about 20 years, so half of our lives. We’re experienced artists, mature artists in a way, really willing to go there.
I remember at the time my partner saying to me—he was very uncomfortable watching us perform. He said, “You know, I mean, I just don’t trust that you guys might not start fucking right now on stage.” And I said, “Well, what if we did? You’re a theater artist. There are love scenes in theater.” If we had, it would be because it made sense in that moment in the way that a playwright or a film writer would create a love scene or a sex scene or whatever. Our only agreement with each other was that we had to be able—both physically and psychically—to come back the next night and dance with each other. So we couldn’t do anything that was going to hurt somebody so badly physically that they couldn’t perform, or do anything that was so psychologically risky that the time didn’t exist to process what happened.
GS
It seems like the piece was built around the idea that you can follow certain impulses: consent within certain parameters. There are these moments of intimacy and gentleness and softness, moments that look so much like Steve Paxton-esque contact, but then also moments that are aggressive, kind of violent moments, and those moments switch so quickly, one from the other.
PS
In the early days, developing contact improvisation, Steve Paxton used to frequently admonish students, “Don’t play the gland game. This is just about physics.” And for me, as an openly gay man, that always felt very repressed. That felt like—well, suppose we do Contact Improvisation and own our glands at the same time, and let it be physics and chemistry and biology: let all of that be in the messy mix, instead of it just being about weight and balance and gravity.
GS
I had a dance teacher who had trained with Anna Halprin for many years, and I remember we were doing contact improv in class. She paused the class, and she just grabbed her own groin and said, “Anna came up to me in class and said, ‘You can also dance from here.'” For her and for Halprin, it’s always about your full body and your full physicality and all of the “ands” that implies.
PS
Of course, the physics are about weight sharing and momentum, but it can never just be that, right? Otherwise, I think you’re creating these stoppages about how you are able to dance freely or safely. It was important for me as a gay man living in Minnesota to manifest this type of performance here precisely because there are all these contradictions. I mean, gay rights had been a part of Minneapolis City Ordinance since the 1970s, and yet gay sex in Minnesota was still a felony. So, there was this way in which, “Well, do you really get to be your whole self?” It was important for me to do Unsafe, Unsuited as a way to push the boundaries of who gets to be and how we get to be.
GS
For me, so much of the performance of this era—and one of its lasting impacts—was the heightened cultural context that produced these vulnerable, aggressive, brave impulses in performance, whether that was channeled through work by Karen Finley, Tim Miller, or through an artist like Ron Athey. How do you present the body, and how do you shock a kind of complacency out of your audience?
PS
You made me think about this as you were talking—so many of the solo performance artists were text based. For me, the joy of Unsafe, Unsuited was to do work that came out of that same impetus that wasn’t text based. It had some text that every now and then sort of guided or shaped the dance, but it essentially wasn’t text based. It was kinesthetically based, and done with enough clarity that people got it in the same way they could get one of Tim Miller’s stories or Karen Finley’s stories.
GS
For you, having been an artist during that moment and still actively making work today, what are aesthetic, political, or activist lessons learned from making art in that moment?
PS
First thing that comes to mind is: when your friends are dying, you damn well better be paying attention. You need to be willing to be out there on the front lines yourself, and so the extrapolation from that is: and probably when they aren’t, also. If you’re an artist and you hope to have something to say, you’ve got to be willing to say it with that same ferocity, that same degree of conviction.
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