What Happens Outside the Box
Last week, a piece of performance art almost literally drove a woman
crazy. Some performers were doing something secret in a gigantic,
silvery box that filled the small stage of the Rendezvous Theater. The
woman wanted in.
“My biggest fear has always been that someone will rush the box,”
said Korby Sears, the organizer and host of STRIKETHROUGH, a monthly
series in which he invites different performers (actors, dancers,
musicians, even primarily visual artists) to do something that nobody
can see inside an eight-by-eight-foot box made of Dow insulation panels
on a small stage that shares a building with a bar. “And she rushed the
box.”
The few other spectators in the theater said that the woman, who
looked very normal—”when you go to the dentist’s office, she’s
the person behind the counter who checks you in,” one
said—ordered dinner and a drink. (The Rendezvous has tables in
the back of its long, shotgun theater.) Then, in the middle of the
performance, she rushed the box, trying to tear it open and lobbing
pint glasses and
bulbous glass candleholders—”mazel tov
cocktails,” a manager at the Rendezvous called them—at the
performers inside. The performers happened to be Implied Violence, an
ensemble that just won a Stranger Genius Award. (Only one of them,
Megan Birdsall, suffered slight scratches.) The aggressor demanded to
know “who was in charge.” When nobody piped up, she stormed out. The
woman, another witness said, “must’ve been suffering from
antiperformance anxiety.”
Sears discourages people from coming to STRIKETHROUGH, but if you
drop by and want to sit outside the box for a few minutes, it’s not
strictly forbidden. The series has
everything a normal performance
would—except an audience. Sears asks performers to write an
original piece that’s 15 to 90 minutes long, rehearse it, run tech
rehearsals, and perform it. Sears tacks up posters and sends out press
releases (wherein all the text is struck through) listing the date,
location, and time of each performance, followed by a notice in bold:
“NO ONE ADMITTED. No public. No press. No family. No friends.” For
every STRIKETHROUGH, Sears sends a postcard to Mayor Greg Nickels,
asking him to stay home on the night of the performance.
The first time I attended, DK Pan was—allegedly—inside
the box. It sounded like he was jumping on a trampoline while three
low, electronic tones droned out of speakers overhead. “It’s
Schrödinger’s Cat: The Musical,” whispered a friend I’d
brought along. He snickered a bit—there’s something comically
decadent about a performance that doesn’t want your attention, love, or
money—but reported no urge to hurl pint glasses at the
performers. 
What Happens Inside the Box
T his just isn’t about you./> “In 2006, I was 37, and I wrote this song cycle,” says Korby Sears,
a member of the loose performance group Seattle School. “I wanted to
perform it, it needed to be exhumed from me, but it didn’t need an
audience. I wondered, will they rent out the Rendezvous to me just to
do this thing, get it out of my system, and be gone? And then I
thought, does anyone else have work they want to do that’s just between
them and the cosmos?”
Under the name The Malfeasance Four, Sears performed the first
STRIKETHROUGH in January—not that song cycle, but another piece
about “recalibrating my relationship with money”—with the
blessing of the Belltown theater-bar the Rendezvous. STRIKETHROUGH is,
basically, a performance for no one but the performer. The location is
important: “It’s an act of privacy that occurs right in the center of
downtown,” Sears says.
Every month he finds a performer and spends about $500 of his own
money on the theater rental and for posters and advertising disinviting
everyone (the project is recalibrating his relationship with his own
money). Artists are loving the privacy and formality of
STRIKETHROUGH—the chance to create, rehearse, and produce without
the restraint of an audience.
“I really, really needed this,” said Marya Sea Kaminski, an actor
who was transitioning from performing in a group to producing a
one-woman show when she wrote June’s STRIKETHROUGH. “I totally
rehearsed. I made costumes and a soundtrack. Confronting the fact that
it was just for me and just for a theater space actually challenged me
not to half-ass it.
“When I got in there, it was really scary. It was a lot scarier than
I thought it would be. I felt very alone. It demanded surrender, which
I’m really not used to onstage.”
In July, Jennifer Zwick, a photographer, presented an entire musical
about Teddy Roosevelt in the STRIKETHROUGH box, including members of
her family as performers. But there was no documentation. The rule is
that only the people inside the box can ever know what happened.
This month, photographer Steven Miller is scheduled to perform.
Miller and Zwick both incorporate performance into their photographs,
and Miller says this is a chance for him to “do to myself what I always
ask other people to do.” Following the regulations of STRIKETHROUGH,
which Sears hands out to every artist who participates, Miller can only
speak vaguely about his upcoming show, which is titled Bruised
Fruit and includes him, one other performer, and a single prop: “I
think all I can say is that if there wasn’t a box around this, I’d
probably get arrested.”
The next stranger genius award should go to the woman who attacked the box. While violence is never to be encouraged, artists who go so far as to perform privately in a public space and egotistically announce their non-performance are certainly deserving of at scorn, and if their smug behavior provoked violence, they don’t have my sympathy. They put up their little posters and send out press releases and then say “No one admitted”—-well, I guess not everyone thought they were so arty and cool! People should attend and scream, cajole, heckle, and otherwise non-violently disturb the elitist assholes who can only drag the real artistic avant-garde through the metaphorical mud of their own not-so-clever antics, Cretins! Fools! Bombastic clowns. May the box suck these monstrous poseurs into a black hole from which they never escape!
How incredibly silly.
I liked that the woman attacked the box. More people should attack the box. More people should rush stages in general and make performers afraid.
1. I don’t think anyone was trying to get sympathy for the performer in the box the night that the woman attacked it.
2. I think these types of responses are not only to be expected but I would bet that, to some, they’re almost a little thrilling. To know that you’re affecting someone that much or in that way? Just a guess…I could be wrong.
3. If you hate the idea of these performances so much, just, um, DON’T GO.