AMERICAN LANGUAGE SHOW NOTES:

      THE ALPHABET OF SAVAGES

      © Alan Reade, 1991 and 2020












      Dance on Capitol Hill, Seattle, Washington, September 13, 14, and 15, 1991


      Performers and Participants

      Alan Reade--Vocals, Keyboard, Sampling Keyboard
      Tom Larsen--Fretless Bass
      Jeri Francis--Electric Guitar
      Pavel Shapp--Drums
      Carl Juarez--Electronic Saxophone
      Raven--Backup Singing, Dancing
      Roselle Williams--Backup Singing, Dancing
      Corey Hoyt--Sound Production
      Ken Andreson--Video Images of Performance


      Notes

      From 1988 to 1991, I had been performing all over Seattle at open mikes, taverns, etc., with my collaborator at the time, singer and actress Maggie Bloodstone. She and I fronted a part-time band we called "idiophone." I worked out all the music with Tom Larsen on bass, Bien on guitar, and assorted drummers, out in a borrowed studio in the U District (by the University of Washington). Maggie and I each wrote half the lyrics for our shows. We didn't really collaborate that much lyrically, but we did give each other a lot of feedback. Without the band, we also did performances where I would read poems and then back her with a sampling keyboard (simple rap beats, etc.) on some of her numbers.

      By 1990, I realized I wanted a structure for our work. I envisioned something sort of like Vaudeville, sort of like Laurie Anderson's United States Live, and with touches of Ringling Brothers, backed, of course, by a punk band. The series of performances would be divided up by the various umbrella subjects on which the hundreds of poems I'd written were based. I envisioned the performance series as having five parts, and I decided, for the sake of structure, to pattern each part of the series after a vowel sound.

      Why "American Language" as an overall moniker? Well, I wanted to go with something that was about the fact that I see American--not English--as the real language Americans speak. We're not British anymore, dammit! After looking through a lot of poems, I decided the five shows were going to be about language, the environment, space travel, the seasons, and death, subjects I found myself writing about a lot back then.

      Maggie and I had somewhat of a falling out in 1991, and I was left to come up with twice the material that I had planned. The theater booked, I forged ahead. I added some older material--stuff I had written back in 1986 or 1987, when I was still 18 years old, like "Helping Hand," a piece performed with a flashlight inside a pink rubber glove.

      The Alphabet of Savages was going to be the "A" show, and so I looked into symbology behind the letter A: the alphabet, beginnings, origins, Aries. I decided that this would be a Pentacles show, because Pentacles in tarot cards are about resources, fundamentals, how wealth is divided up. The motion of the performance would rise and fall, peak and valley: AAAAAAA. There would be a lot of "construction" sounds in the performance so the guitar and drum lines were written with a sense of rigor, again mirroring the actual structure of the letter A, while the lyrics gave the show its calmer side.

      I assembled the troops: Tom on bass, Jeri Francis on electric guitar, idiophone semi-regular drummer Pavel Shapp on skins, Carl Juarez on electronic sax, and two backup singers and dancers, Roselle Williams and Raven, the latter who also worked at the Lusty Lady. Her husband, Keith, ran the slides for the show. By the way, this was promoted as a performance by idiophone, not by me.

      The show ended up being about language and human rights, in a looser sense. It made the point that the Phoenicians had originally started what became our written alphabet in order to trade with the "savages" on the coasts of the surrounding seas--and so that the language that became English, and then "American," was originally based on trade, power, money. The performance made the point that little has changed in the language's present form, and so there are a lot of references in the piece to language disempowering and empowering people--e.g., a piece about how a "blank check" could be perceived as dominance versus generosity depending on the receiver's point of view; "Dr. Alphabet" turning slurs into songs via a sampling keyboard; a revised "Pledge of Allegiance." One recurring image was a stylized image of a fetus ("A," "Aleph," "beginnings"). One question the show posed was "What happens to a nation that shares no one common language?" I took a trip to New York City not long before the performance and I came back with a lot of photographic images of haves and have-nots, which I used for many of the slides.

      The show did not break box-office records the one weekend it played, to say the least. For one thing, it was mistakenly billed as a dance performance by some newspapers, as it was taking place in what was traditionally a dance studio. Also, there were extreme problems with the lighting guys, whom I'd hired from a local community college and whom I would not trust to turn on the lights in my bathroom, in hindsight. In the video of the show, you can see me running offstage to tell them, "Turn the fucking lights on! I'm in total dark!"

      But what can I say? It was my first big performance piece; it was bound to be a little frustrating. One show was a benefit for Chicken Soup Brigade, a service organization helping people with AIDS in Seattle, so I was proud to bring them some money. All in all, I was happy with the results, even if I did wear my politics on my sleeve...everyone is 23 once.


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