Hightlights of Performance Art
So, I didn’t make it to Spiderman 3 this weekend. But I did make it to Ipso Facto, a set of performance art pieces at Columbia College. It was pretty wild. Normally, performance art is a little stuffy for me. The first piece, for example, was a really preachy, irritating, and slightly offensive (to me, personally) one-woman monologue about comsumption and greed. She was basically saying that in modern society, we’re compensating for feeling inferior by being greedy. Overall, it was essentially unwatchable.
But, then, there were two pieces that were excellent. One was an almost-dance piece combined with video documentary footage of people on the street who were asked whether they thought the world was becoming more beautiful or more cruel. The other was a collection of short one-person scenes with a look at modern religion that, quite frankly, made me really emotional.
This is really why I go to strange, fruity things like performance art and modern dance. If it’s bad, it’s really bad. But, if it’s good, it’s REALLY good.
Still, though, I would have to say that my two favorite performance pieces of all time are: (1) The guy at the Blue Line Jackson stop that does one-man reinactments of “famous” movie scenes. One day, I skipped the train to see the ending of the scene from “Maid in Manhattan.” and (2) The time when I was working at UNLV, and my coworker caught a strong gust of wind. Her skirt blew up over her head in front of a group of about 60 incoming Freshman getting a Campus Tour. Brilliant.
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