Excerpt from “Felicia Rice and DOC/UNDOC: Collaboration and Metamorphosis.” See video here.
RISK
In the summer of 2011,
I take a La Pocha Nostra performance art workshop
with my collaborator, Guillermo Gomez-Peña and his troupe.
My intention is to work more closely with Guillermo
in order to further my work
with the book as performance art,
the book object performing the text.
Very quickly I realize I am also
exploring the book artist as performance artist.
For two weeks I live with twenty-six others from around the world
in a basement performance space in downtown San Francisco.
We eat, sleep,
bare ourselves and our bodies,
and work together using techniques and exercises
that take us to internal spaces
that can be quite dark and scary, but FUN.
The challenge is to reveal
those dark, hidden places
and experience them with others.
Let me set the stage.
First, clothe yourself in any combination of costumes and props,
and reach for shared meaning with another.
Slowly disrobe and extend your bodies out along the floor,
rolling and wrapping in a cocoon of ropes.
Open your eyes. Check in.
What action would contribute to the mix of movement in play?
Clinging to the wall like an insect? If only we could.
Move in slow motion in a feather boa,
as a figure streaks across the room behind you
carrying a replica of a gun.
Now focus on the writhing mound
in the center of the performance space,
bodies slither in the periphery.
Join in.
Stretch.
My mother had died the year before at the age of 92,
a natural death at home.
With the encouragement of the troupe,
I relive her death
through a spoken word performance
before an audience.
White sheer nightgown,
spaghetti straps slipping from my shoulders.
Wide red clown mouth smeared across my face.
I loll on a chair, slowly breathing,
whispering the story of her last days
and twisting repeatedly to the left.
Drugged and delirious,
over and over she lifts her head and right shoulder
and heaves her upper body over to the left.
This repeated gesture is common to the dying.
She is going, but where?
Going to die.
Going to meet her maker.
Going home.
Going to say good-bye.
Going to see her loved ones long gone themselves.
My niece climbs up on the bed and holds her between her legs,
it looks like the act of birth, but does not calm her.
We move her limp body to a wheel chair
and push her around the house
until she nearly slides out of the chair.
She is leaving us, she is going.
And finally, after eleven days
with one last breath, she went.
Performance dates
DOC/UNDOC: Collaboration and Metamorphosis
September 2014, Michigan State University, Lansing, MI
October 2014, Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery, UCSC, Santa Cruz, CA
January 2015, Galería de la Raza, San Francisco, CA
March 2015, Colophon Club, Berkeley, CA
April 2015, University of Iowa, IA
Documentado/Undocumented: Ars Poetica Shamanica: an evening of performance
SF Camerawork, San Francisco, CA
December 8, 2011
La Pocha Nostra Summer Workshop
Performance Art Institute, San Francisco, CA
August 6, 2011