AMERICAN LANGUAGE SHOW NOTES:
UNSPEAKABLE LOVE ACTS
© Alan Reade, 1996 and 2020
Dixon Place, New York, New York, January 19, 1996
Parts of this performance were premiered New Music Night, Squid Row, Seattle, Washington, May 18, 1989; at the performance Darkness, with Maggie Bloodstone, Tsikal Studios, Seattle, Washington, September 9, 1989; and at the open reading at Dixon Place, New York, New York, September 12, 1995.Performers and Participants
Alan Reade--Vocals, Small Keyboard
Harry Mann--Saxophone
Dixon Place--Video Images of Performance
"The Gentleman (an Operap)" written by Alan Reade and Maggie Bloodstone
Notes
In the late summer of 1995, I moved to New York City. I immediately began attending the open nights at Dixon Place, the performance-art space in lower Manhattan. When I started reading the new poetic/monologue pieces there that became parts of "Unspeakable Love Acts," I received a lot of good feedback. Ellie Covan, proprietor of Dixon Place, saw the video of me reading at an open night of theirs and offered me my own show in January of 1996.
Mind you, Unspeakable Love Acts was performed "out of order": It is really number 3 in the American Language performance series, but I actually performed it fourth, after Dancing With The Dead in 1994 and after a year of producing the play Bitchy Bitch LIVE! in 1995. Some of the material had been performed as early as 1989--I had dragged some poems back out of their folders, rewriting some of them, to put in the new show. Because of logistics, I did not perform the piece "The Gentleman," which I co-wrote with Maggie Bloodstone in 1989, at this venue. However, it was always planned to be a part of the piece, and so it is included here.
During this period, I was chiefly influenced by the performance styles of Karen Finley and John Leguizamo, which involved more monologues. I wanted to keep it simple--and cheap--so instead of a band, I worked with saxophonist Harry Mann to give the piece a street-corner jazz-musician feel. I was satisfied with the musical results.
This performance used the vowel sound "I" for its sound model, with jazz notes played up and down a scale, and that theme was carried through in the show's subject matter on ego and sexuality. Its tarot-card suit was Wands, for fire, spirit, "thrust." The slide images played on a theme of valentines (which were being sold in the months before and during the performance) and adult-bookstore neon (some of my slides being the last pictures ever taken of some 42nd Street sleaze shops before Disney took over the area) to set up a dissonance between sexuality and intimacy that I was exploring in the work. The performance was really about the public, conscious persona that goes into, say, a want ad versus the vulnerable, unconscious self that seeks love and connection on other levels.
This was also the first solo show I'd done that was really character driven. Each of the four characters had certain poems to deliver, so they were stylized characterizations, as set up in "Pornography in Four Parts."
I appeared as a double bill (like most Dixon Place shows) with a group that, I found out too late, was presenting a light opera piece suitable for children--several of whom were in the show audience. My performance began with the title of the performance framed amidst copulating men photographed from various gay porn magazines. I then walked out on stage with a dildo jutting from my fly. There was stunned silence and then a few titters. Throughout the show, I felt that some of the parents wanted me dead. How Ellie paired me with a fluffy operetta about falling in love at the library, I will never know....
Anyway, in retrospect, I liked the show. And working the door that night was performance artist Tim Driscoll, of the show My Hole Life. I've since become a big fan of his work. Sad to say, this piece was performed in its entirety one time only. The negative feedback from the mismatched audience that night put me in a space where I did not want to do live performance art for a while. So I only did a few readings for the remainder of the three years I was in New York. When I moved to San Francisco in 1998, though, my desire to create full performance-art pieces re-asserted itself!
Close this window to return to American Language.
Mind you, Unspeakable Love Acts was performed "out of order": It is really number 3 in the American Language performance series, but I actually performed it fourth, after Dancing With The Dead in 1994 and after a year of producing the play Bitchy Bitch LIVE! in 1995. Some of the material had been performed as early as 1989--I had dragged some poems back out of their folders, rewriting some of them, to put in the new show. Because of logistics, I did not perform the piece "The Gentleman," which I co-wrote with Maggie Bloodstone in 1989, at this venue. However, it was always planned to be a part of the piece, and so it is included here.
During this period, I was chiefly influenced by the performance styles of Karen Finley and John Leguizamo, which involved more monologues. I wanted to keep it simple--and cheap--so instead of a band, I worked with saxophonist Harry Mann to give the piece a street-corner jazz-musician feel. I was satisfied with the musical results.
This performance used the vowel sound "I" for its sound model, with jazz notes played up and down a scale, and that theme was carried through in the show's subject matter on ego and sexuality. Its tarot-card suit was Wands, for fire, spirit, "thrust." The slide images played on a theme of valentines (which were being sold in the months before and during the performance) and adult-bookstore neon (some of my slides being the last pictures ever taken of some 42nd Street sleaze shops before Disney took over the area) to set up a dissonance between sexuality and intimacy that I was exploring in the work. The performance was really about the public, conscious persona that goes into, say, a want ad versus the vulnerable, unconscious self that seeks love and connection on other levels.
This was also the first solo show I'd done that was really character driven. Each of the four characters had certain poems to deliver, so they were stylized characterizations, as set up in "Pornography in Four Parts."
I appeared as a double bill (like most Dixon Place shows) with a group that, I found out too late, was presenting a light opera piece suitable for children--several of whom were in the show audience. My performance began with the title of the performance framed amidst copulating men photographed from various gay porn magazines. I then walked out on stage with a dildo jutting from my fly. There was stunned silence and then a few titters. Throughout the show, I felt that some of the parents wanted me dead. How Ellie paired me with a fluffy operetta about falling in love at the library, I will never know....
Anyway, in retrospect, I liked the show. And working the door that night was performance artist Tim Driscoll, of the show My Hole Life. I've since become a big fan of his work. Sad to say, this piece was performed in its entirety one time only. The negative feedback from the mismatched audience that night put me in a space where I did not want to do live performance art for a while. So I only did a few readings for the remainder of the three years I was in New York. When I moved to San Francisco in 1998, though, my desire to create full performance-art pieces re-asserted itself!
Close this window to return to American Language.