Ann Liv Young: performance artist for the Palin moment

Ann Liv Young "Bagwell"

Kurt Kren has noted, "No wound ever speaks for itself"

We have Ann Liv Young to speak for the 'wound"...

When thinking about Ann Liv Young, one must remember the early actionists in the '50s in Vienna, who moved beyond all social boundaries with their aggressive performance actions straight from the Id, shoved the world back at their viewers and defied all social expectations of decorum. Their torch is carried high by Ann Liv Young, a force to behold, whose "The Bagwell in Me" is a daring and stellar work. She performs a kind of exorcism in which she acts as our "primal scream."

The inception of this mindboggling narrative began when Young discovered her relatives, the Bagwells, owned slaves. To explore this shocking fact further, she created a play revolving around the ever moral and genteel George Washington, who could not tell a lie after he chopped down the cherry tree. History lies and conveniently leaves out the sordid tales of ownership of human beings, objectified
as flesh, traded for money, used for sexual pleasure, and then tossed away. Willing to look the revulsion of owning people straight in the eye, Young forces the audience to strip down as well, to drop their guard, to blow open that pristine portrait of George Washington and all the George Washingtons of the world who speak and live as hypocritical racists.

George Washington's shiny face is as tarnished as every other slave owner and trader of flesh, a fact which still remains with us today. Not even a week ago we witnessed John McCain shooting his hand at Obama and saying, "That one over there." He never would have uttered that if he were debating Kerry or any other white person. That is certain.

The ferocious veracity of Young's message lunges at the audience as she sharpens her sword on a litany of words and actions, destroying all dramaturgical decorum. In her startling visceral performance she does not let one complacently sit by--we are active participants in this harrowing tale of lust, betrayal, danger, domination, slave trade, and lineage which still resonates. One of her trademarks is to break the narrative movement of the story by interjecting a different story. Splitting time apart, she oscillates between the historical scenes with George Washington and those modeled on contemporary strip clubs. She unsettles the audience by blurring the boundaries between the real and the scripted, mingling impromptu commands into the performance. For instance, at one moment she demands her sound be fixed, or the music in her computer made louder.

It is a hard act to pull off, but whereas others generally produce a contrived result, Young succeeds in creating a fusion of the real, the fictional, the imagined, the constructed, and the manipulated. By destroying the traditional play format, the audience is disoriented, our equilibrium overthrown, placing us in a vulnerable position. She interestingly aligned the stripper disco to slavery, raising issues of the 'body' with regard to who owns it. The girls in strip clubs are paid to become objectified. Yet they have a choice in most instances. The reference to another kind of flesh trade, for amusement and excitement, is an increasingly complex thread.

Did she shock people? Yes. Did she titillate? Perhaps. Did she "gross out," to
borrow a phrase? Maybe...Did she scare the audience? Yes.

In "Bagwell" Young destroys boundaries with the audience. I say "destroy" boundaries because "interacts" is too cold. Young moved from the stage into the audience with livid bold vehemence, fury and the look of a person possessed. Her entrance into the audience was not gratuitous. This play absolutely called for those Actions, with a capitol A. It was mentioned [in countercritic's post] that she assaulted her audience members in Bagwell. She did not assault the audience in this piece. The aggression was completely called for. If one is dealing with slave owners who could at the drop of a pin rape and pillage their work force, kill them, unexpectedly, have them live on the edge of terror- then Ann succeeded in making us feel afraid- in the safety of our seats. I saw the play on Friday- and she barely touched the man who complained. I was sitting in his row and saw the entire "incident." Her quick intelligence meant she was able to not only step into the real universe and give him hell for hassling her- she was also able to stay in character as an "owner of human beings." As she stated to the complaining audience member "I own you. You are my property."

It was breathtaking watching her switch back and forth between being George Washington and Martha... Speaking in voices... Breaking out of storyline to dance strip disco thereby throwing expected body rhythms off in the viewers.

In Young's previous performance at the Kitchen, "Snow White," her actions were kept within the confines of the stage. The story was a nonlinear tortured love rant based on the storybook character. Liv is no Snow White. Moving in and out of character she read love letters, sang songs of loss, lamented the broken heart, became a late night DJ drifting into psychologically complex and pained narration. Ms. Young tries to understand human connections in all her works. She is our connection to lost loves, passion, and confusion. I read a review that implies Bagwell is a superficial and simplistic play that adds nothing to our understanding of slavery. One would have to wonder what it would take to wake this unconscious person up, given what was put before him on stage.

Young's play is a powerful treatise on the horrors of slavery (of all kinds, if one wants to stretch beyond the obvious): All oppression is tyranny--and psychological and community oppression, while polite can also kill the soul. "Bagwell" exposes the troubles at the heart of global economies and politics as well as the minutiae of personal lives.

I have also read that she re-uses her riffs. All artists have a signature style. If they are good, we come back for more. Sam Shepard does not write like Thomas Pynchon, Scorsese does not direct like Gus Van Zant, Pina Bausch does not dance like Ann Liv Young. Each of these aforementioned artists have identifiable, strong styles, which is part of why we like their work and their content is dependent on the delivery. Form does follow function.

Young's aggression was definitely needed to shake the audience and wake us up. A line in a song "Fake Empire" by the band The Nationals is "we're half awake in a fake empire". Well, we are half awake. Every now and then we need to get banged in the head to wake up in our fake empire. I am glad to have Young around for that. We are all so inured from genre films to blood and gore and sentimental documentaries of the horrors of slavery, which distance racism as if it has dissipated. We are lost in our computers. Young exposes the fear that one's flesh, one's very being, may be subjected to another's whims. At any moment you may be murdered, raped, tortured. In fact, it also highlights the sad tale of torture the current administration continues to inflict on the detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.

Young, it can be said, lives in the spirit of the great line of eye-opening humans who make wake up 'art' such as Paul McCarthy, Marina Abramovic, Dieter Roth, Karen Finley, Annie Sprinkle, Valie Export, Thomas Hirshhorn, or Kurt Kren, who collaborated with the performance artists Günter Brus and Otto Mühl on a series of films made between 1964 and 1967 in which they fornicated and shat. Yes, that is appalling yet these films were made to expose our shit. They were simple, powerful statements of the human condition. Pathos runs through "Bagwell."

Young, whose elastic face can within seconds go from rage to angelic (she is quite beatific when she smiles) exposes the dirty raw horror of these actions. As she defies good manners yet she embodies an enormous amount of vulnerability, which makes the rage so much more poignant and terrifying. In the last scene of the wild ride in "Bagwell" Oney sings a Sam Cooke song "Change is Gonna Come." It was performed as a lament which brought some of us to tears after the relentless energy, disorientation and 'fear' that Ann so brilliantly put on stage.

To be terrified and mesmerized, hypnotized and fulfilled, to be on the skin of your flesh and the edge of your senses- is something quite phenomenal- given how jaded and unperturbed the art world has become with regard to performance and living on the edge, along with the world at large that accepts the death filled days of children and innocent people and only worry that someone who knows how to read might find their way into their backyards. I am not only speaking of America here. Polite is everywhere- Ann is not polite. Polite is boring, Ann is anything but...

And as I digress, I left out mentioning the other stars of the show, the audience and the tech people and of course The Kitchen without whom Young's performance would not be able to be carried back out into the world.

Apollinaire responds:
Wow. what a rant. Thank you for the explosion of words and thoughts!

I like that you compare Palin with Ann Liv. Very important. Also I like your last sentence.

If you haven't yet got the chain letter about the list of women for Obama, from PA, let me know and Ill send it to you.

Thanks,
Lori

Oh, no, no chain letters! But of course women like Obama--as well they, and everyone else, should! ~Apollinaire