Glenna Stearman Park, Performance Art

Glenna Stearman Park. 1971

Anachronisms: Dominoes

Although I do not claim to be serious about organized religion, there are times when I feel a need for historical religious structure and pattern. For this, I went to a Catholic service to enjoy the music, the Latin, and the artifacts. Drifting in my own bubble of thought, I suddenly heard, “I can play dominoes better than you can,” answered by another priest singing back, “I can play dominoes better than you can,” followed by other vocalizations. Time to slip out of the service as I knew my next performance art piece! Through the auspices of Jumpstart Performance Art Company, I arranged to do a performance night at the old limestone chapel at the Southwest Craft Center, on the river in San Antonio, Texas. (The Ursuline Academy, beginning as a Catholic girls’ boarding school, next the arts and crafts school, and now part of University of Texas San Antonio art department.)

I hired my favorite San Antonio opera tenors, George Cortez and Jake Cantu, to dress in hooded “monk like” long robes and start singing in the style of a  Gregorian chant, off stage, the line “I can play dominoes better than you can.”  Musically playing around, varying the tempo and the pitch, the tenors improvised as they seemingly busied themselves around the altar. The limestone chapel was dark, with the light coming up slowly. The singers entered the stage, coming toward the altar. Their continued random vocalization echoed in the stone chapel. They lit two candles, and cleared space on the altar where they placed a white cloth covered tray. The intensity of the dominoes challenge singing grew as they moved around addressing each other.

At the same time a female figure draped in a white sheet was standing quietly in an architectural niche, frozen like a Roman or Greek statue, watching the two monks.  They stepped to the altar as their music hit a crescendo, removed the white cloth, revealing two bottles of beer and started playing dominoes. The figure in the niche looked over at what they were doing and moved slightly while lighting a cigarette. At that moment the reveal of the  anachronism was evident.

Lights out.

Philosophically, I considered my performance art as “cartooning” compared to standard theater work. I did not write scripts, but hired actors, dancers, and singers who could do improvisational work in the spirit of my concept. I had studied performance art with Alan Kaprow in graduate school, “The History of Performance Art in New York,” and liked the openness of not being scripted. In this piece, Dominoes,  I wanted the actors to play off each other as the performance unwrapped itself in intellectual slow motion, playing with the audience, who by the way were sitting in pews inside a historic chapel. 

Like my paintings, my performance art was often political, but could be light-hearted as when I heard the Latin of a religious ceremony being about playing dominoes.  It was an elaborate comedy based on a misunderstanding of what the priests were chanting to each other.

My Introduction to Performance Art 

I remember always wanting to do something theatrical on stage at East High. I paid attention to Mr. Foster’s classical  dramatic productions, but knew my ideas were not exactly like his. Friday afternoon pep rallies were a form of theater. I never quite figured out the concept in high school, but graduate school with Alan Kaprow opened up a new art form with me.  My performance art ideas were based on eureka moments, where I realized exactly what I wanted, but had to find actors and musicians who would play my way. Often, my work was between live action installation art and sort of  “one liner” theatre events. Performance art can be understood as just a bigger pencil, another tool, where the “art piece” can have the same range of subject matter as a sketch or as a fully developed composition.  

Years later, when I was teaching Performance Art at the Memphis College of Art, my students and I created a performance piece at the Brooks Museum of Art. We staged traditional Greek poses in the empty, exterior architectural niches of the pseudo Greek museum building. Dressed in all white sheets with one added anachronistic element to the costume – like watches, glasses, cigarettes, and red high-top sneakers – the performers struck poses for a fixed time. One of the Black students chose to do his poses wearing “white-face” stage make up as a special point of humor. With synchronized timing, the actors moved to each other’s niches and froze in another pose. This performance was done after dark with spotlights on the empty niches, just as guests were arriving for a museum party.  

Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis

It was unannounced with what we called an “Art Attack.” After the performance, the audience and museum director invited the performers inside to join the party. Other “Art Attacks” happened in downtown Memphis during the Friday night art walks for the balance of the semester.  

Alan Kaprow’s course was a four-hour studio, one day a week. We usually worked on planned pieces, presented to the class; other times we were required to do work with no predetermined dramatic activity, usually conceived and performed in the moment. The course taught me to be aware of the potential for art outside the theater or gallery. I expanded on a performance piece done by a fellow graduate student when I was teaching in the English department at Bexar County Jail, in San Antonio, Texas. 

One time. when I had dinner guests and it came time for me to serve coffee and dessert, I did an opportunistic performance piece. We moved to the living room, and I put on a wedding veil and long white gloves as I served from a silver tray. One of the guests, a lawyer, asked me if I was  “defiling the veil” and I laughed and said, “Absolutely!” and then we had a somewhat heated discussion about the outfit as a work uniform (which was often hung in my kitchen on a towel hook). 

I told him that I considered the veil as a death mask where the woman is symbolically declared dead by her father as he presents her for a property transference ceremony among men. The minister or priest asks who gives this woman, and the father says, “I do.” Then the officiant asks, “Who takes this woman?” and the fiancé says, “I do.”  Finally, the minister asks the veiled, untethered female if she will go along with their deal, and is given a new last name if she agrees. Presented in different circumstances of being “property,” this form of “American Masking” offended or amused most audiences. That lawyer was appalled with my idea, and later divorced his wife and accused me of teaching her feminist ideas.  Ultimately that was a private performance piece based in the political setting of feminist art. I also considered it somewhat comedic. 

At the same time I was doing these impromptu performances, the more traditionally trained actors in Jumpstart Theater Company were arriving at dinner parties as guests. They would arrive for dinner with the other guests and participate as actors doing a semi-scripted event that, of course, had to deal with the “audience” also at the table. This kind of theatrical event was happening in two Broadway plays, one a Jewish funeral, and another a wedding. I took some of my students to New York to see Tony and Tina’s Wedding, where the wedding in a real chapel on Christopher Street, was a scripted event with the audience as the wedding guests. This style of work called for the actors to interact, going beyond the stage,  with the wedding guests.  At the reception dinner, some of the bridesmaids asked my high school students to dance, and got fairly fresh with the boys and made me nervous as their teacher. The boys loved the participation.

The visual art world had painters doing paintings that were about the edges of color and shape and the interaction of paints in that narrow field (1950s and 1960s modernism). Similarly, the same thing was going on in performance art and modern theater where the edge was ill defined or exaggerated.  Besides having the story-telling aspect of a play, the procedure for telling the story was experimental. 

For me, theater started on Friday afternoons in those staged pep rallies at East High and was fully addressed in Kaprow’s graduate Performance Art class. Jumpstart was my playground.  I loved it! 

Editor’s Note: Glenna has written several stories about her work in performance art.

• “The Egg and I“
• “Marriage as a Primary Combat Training Unit“
• “Vegefiles at the San Antonio Express News“

About teaching art at the Bexar County Jail

• “Notes on Teaching Art“

About veils and other masks

• “American Masking“