Kate Bornstein - who calls herself "a sadomasochistic, anarchistic, anorectic, transsexual, high-femme, dyke artist" - is not worried about making anyone uncomfortable. "My art makes me the most uncomfortable," she said.
Bornstein, a New York-based performance artist and author best known for "My Gender Workbook" - "a practical guide for living with or without gender," according to her Web site - performed her new work "Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger" last week as one of 257 artists who came to Providence for the 11th annual Performance Studies International Conference (PSi), sponsored by the Department of Theatre, Speech and Dance.
The name of this year's conference, "Becoming Uncomfort-able," is a phrase from one of the first speeches given to students and faculty by President Ruth Simmons. Conference Director and Professor of Theatre, Speech and Dance John Emigh said he felt the term resonated with the conference. "Becoming uncomfortable is a necessity in education and in living - it's a necessity to never settle into a zone of comfort. Whether it's living or creating a work of art, it's always a matter of challenging and changing yourself," he said.
"Pleasant Danger," Bornstein's latest work, is a memoir-based performance that looks at questions of families and fatherhood, a subject particularly poignant for Bornstein. Bornstein's father only knew her as his son, and the daughter Bornstein fathered calls another man "dad." The show premiered at "Becoming Un-comfortable," which she found appropriate. "The most uncomfortable thing for me right now is dealing with the whole notion of 'father' - What is a father? What is a daddy? A dad?" she said.
In addition to examining conceptions of family, "Pleasant Danger," as one might intuit from its title, is also a pointed call to arms against what Bornstein perceives as "the right-winging of America." Bornstein, along with many other artists in attendance at last week's conference, is concerned not only about international "discomfort" with U.S. policy in Iraq, but with the dwindling government support artists receive under the Bush administration.
Bornstein stressed the political significance of holding this year's conference in the United States - three of the last four PSi conferences have been held abroad. Since the introduction of the USA Patriot Act after Sept. 11, artists such as Bornstein have claimed that it has become increasingly difficult to receive funding for work that is considered in any way unpatriotic. "Of nations that need art to turn the social agenda around, America's up there," she said.
The field of performance studies is often stuffed under the umbrella of university theater departments or regarded as another highly theoretical genre of post-modern studies. Though it can be both of these, it is, at its best, an interdisciplinary field that brings together artists and scholars, theory and application. According to its mission statement, PSi, which was founded in 1997, "is a professional organization that seeks to create opportunities for dialogue among artists and academics whose concerns converge in the still-evolving areas of live art and performance."
More than 500 people attended this year's conference for a myriad of performances, workshops and lectures. Events ranged from the experimental lesbian theatre group Split Britches to explorations in place storming ("to enter and occupy a site with the intention of staging a benevolent intervention") to workshops on the physical discomfort of ingesting undesired food ("Food, Performance, Community").
What makes PSi unique for a university conference is that its program boasts not only bigger names such as Bornstein, but also emerging artists who will have the opportunity to present their work alongside more established peers, Emigh said. The conference was open to the public.
Also performing was Fred Curchack, whose solo work has been on top 10 lists in both the Dallas Morning News and the New York Times. He stresses the importance of making art accessible for all kinds of people and wants his work to appeal to "kids and teenagers, not just the esoteric theorists."
"The extraordinarily tricky issue in art is that it's in vogue to be uncomfortable, which be-comes another form of comfort," Curchack said.
When asked how one can prevent this state of comfortable discomfort, he said, "the trick is to confront ourselves - not to try to make the audience uncomfortable, but to, as artists, genuinely confront our own comfort, and habit, and self-calming and fooling ourselves that we're all such experts at." Curchack presented two new works at the Trinity Repertory Theater, both of which confronted questions of self-deception and illusion, "Shadows of Gauguin" and "Golden Buddah Beach."
The latter, co-written with his partner, Laura Jorgensen, is based on their experience as two Americans vacationing in Thaliand when December's tsunami hit. "The piece is about two characters, us, trying to get away from it - all the current political garbage that we're exposed to in this country, and escape the war in Iraq, and the election, and the abuse of civil liberties, and the depletion of abortion rights, and the confusion of primitive Christian ideology politics," among other things, Curchack said. "So we're searching, hoping to have a lovely holiday, but we can't escape our own fevered fantasy - not only about the global catastrophe and the war but our own illusions about ourselves and our relationship."
"Golden Buddah Beach," the self-reflections of two Americans in disaster-stricken Thailand, is a comedy.
Let the discomfort begin.
