When Taste Politics Meet Terror
The Critical Art Ensemble on Trial

Joan Hawkins

"And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been
created to teach us that first of all."

-- Antonin Artaud, "No More Masterpieces," 1938. [1]

Setting the Stage

In late September 2001, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus
Ohio, announced that the performances of Charlie Victor Romeo scheduled
for September 26-30 had been cancelled. "We hope you'll understand that
this is not an appropriate time to present this award-winning
Off-Broadway show," the letter accompanying my refund said. "We will
continue to stay in contact with the Collective Unconscious company who
created and perform Charlie Victor Romeo regarding the potential for
rescheduling CVR at the Wexner Center at an appropriate time in the
future."

Charlie Victor Romeo is a documentary play, based on transcripts taken
from the black boxes of downed airplanes, the final communication
between air personnel and the tower. A serious and sober look at the
way people actually behave during a crisis, it won the 2000 Drama Desk
Awards for Best Unique Theatrical Experience and Outstanding Sound
Design, the 2000 New York Fringe Festival awards for Excellence in
Drama and Outstanding Sound Design, and the Backstage West Garland
Award for Best Sound Design. It was filmed by the U.S. Air Force to be
used as a training video for pilots and "has been invited to be
performed for groups of physicians and healthcare administrators
studying the effects of human error and emergencies in a medical
context" (www.charlievictorromeo.com). It also belongs to a group of
experimental dramas -- the plays of Anna Devere Smith, The Laramie
Project , etc -- which have been mixing ethnography, documentary (with
the emphasis here on documents) and theater in provocative and
compelling ways. Theater which has learned and borrowed from
performance art, one could say.

Ed. Note: As many of you know, Ben talked at 16beaver last year. Eve organized the event, this is a short text from NYpress posted on the Interactivist website:

Title John McMillian, "Ben Morea, Garbage Guerrilla"
http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=05/05/06/1354249

Garbage Guerrilla
Jon McMillian, New York Press

In the late 1960s, Ben Morea was the notorious leader of an unsavory Lower East Side anarchist collective called Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker. As a young historian who studies that period, I'd spent almost three years trying to locate him. All the leads I'd followed went nowhere. It was as if Morea had vanished, every bit as thoroughly as a jet contrail.

Not that this was terribly surprising. Even in his heyday, Morea cultivated an air of mystery. In the early 60s, he was an abstract-expressionist painter who signaled his lack of compromising nuances by dressing completely in black. Later in the decade, he used to strut around St. Marks Place and Second Avenue, longhaired and bearded like any number of hippies, but instead of adorning himself in flowers and beads, he wore a leather jacket, carried a switchblade and peddled manifestos full of cryptic poetry and angry agitprop. The Motherfuckers described themselves as a kind of politicized street gang, but in the media they were known only as "a group with a certain unprintable name." Their general attitude toward the counterculture summons to mind something Patti Smith later said about rock 'n' roll: "We created it; let's take it over!"

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