Arriving in Baltimore circa 2005, Theresa Columbus had already been delighting and confounding friends, acquaintances, and audiences around the US for quite some time.  Upon meeting Theresa in Ch-Harm City, I (Catherine) found her exuberance and optimism almost too painful to behold.  Social norms and conventions almost always prompt most functional adults to eventually flatten their affect and rather put a lid on it for grown-up discourse.  Theresa Columbus, thankfully, does not obey these rules.  Jubilant, burbly, and cuddly, her persistent high morale begins to transport those around her to another plane, her plane, a place where language, love, laughter and contemplation all wiggle together in a sort of new Meta-Joy.  After having known Theresa for about a year as a friend, and through curating her performance work, I began to discover a complicated under-pinning to her non-conformity.  She began to engage me in long discussions about her theories of human pleasure, feminist pleasure, cultural critique, and performance methods.  Within the constant wiggling lived an unusual intellectual veracity and curiosity. Also, a pressing desire to enact her theories in the external world in real time, almost all the time, as far as I can tell.

I asked Theresa if we could publish a few of her personal manifestos on the Transmodern web site and she obliged.  We got together for lunch at my house where I made carrot, beet, orange, & ginger juice in the juicer – the purple/blood red ran into the vivid orange as we cheered it on, and complimented it loquaciously into our glasses.   Theresa was talking at rapid fire speed about her recent excitement upon viewing Ryan Trecartin’s video work, an artist I feel is alternately a complete genius and also the Anti-Christ arriving to suck us all into an alternative-matrix-evilclownworld full of crass hysteria and lack of substance (maybe he’s just a certain theme in contemporary art incarnate?) Theresa’s take on him was that his work exemplifies a particular kind of subconscious confrontation that invigorates her mind.  She feels his work beautifully embraces the non-linear complexities of human relationships and communication. 

Her notes on Trecartin jumped off from a line in one of his pieces where a typically dislocated personality cipher character, in a typically mock pissed off /loving manner, urges another character to no particular action by insisting “this is a business!”  Theresa explained her interest in the work’s ability to question all inherent structures, all roles and how they merge and the joy of them merging uncontrollably in our contemporary personal and wired worlds. She said Trecartin is “tapping into the complex nature of [these structures] without exploiting them.”  Or as she commented - “cause you know, “families” are  both amazing and weird” - on a sort of intense note.  She noted that Trecartin exposes to an extreme degree what is funny about our defenses, which is that they are really desperate pleas to try to make us feel closer to one another.  She turned to her own work and said that her primary medium of creative interest is live conversations. Conversations dominate Trecartin’s video work as well with high-speed babbly banter that is frequently incoherent and hysterical, but also funny and seeming to belie an oddball, hyper-aware, postgender reality.  Theresa spoke at length about how conversations can be accessible, free, constant, important, and a joyful part of community. She notes that speaking itself is a creative act. A conversation can also be a place to examine power relationships and control, and where one can use wit and insightfulness to strip away fear, confusion, or alienation. 

Theresa described her theater writing as primarily the euphoria and intellectual stimulation that comes from being able to in manipulate and plan conversations and speeches. She reported that she frequently has a thrilling, ticklish feeling, like a familiar but strange private joke, when beginning to write a play.  The great excitement comes simply from the “idea” that she will take the conversation (dialogue) and begin exaggerating, editing,  and manipulating the language and flow, combined with the knowledge that the eventual outcome is intended to communicate with a mysterious audience.  Rather than focusing on conveying a full scene and narrative arc, she is more interested in drawing attention to the process of how the theatrical conversation/dialogue is conceived, controlled, abstracted, and released.

A simplified example is taking a speech for one character and dividing it randomly between two characters.  This mutation in theatrical norms brings the audience back to the core fact that the line was truly only generated by one omniscient voice, the writer, revealing the limitations of the writer’s role, which we can sometimes think of as a neutral vessel rather than a biased person sculpting their truth. Conversely, an overtly contrived form can draw attention to the power of the writer to break down, reconceive, and re-invent dialogue.  IE – let’s reveal that it is not a real conversation, but one conceived in private, disseminated to a group, and  thereby mutated into something else. Though we toss conversation about all day long, it is full of profound poetry, and on a stage this can be dramatically celebrated. These ideas hold as much weight (or even more weight) than traditional dramatic structure in her work. She also employs humor to reveal conversational pratfalls.  In fact, she sees all humor as crucial grounding in her life and creative work.  She explains, an old clown once told me, “we are on the track, going smoothly down the track, and then things derail: that’s humor.” Then laughter,  the surprise, brings us to the actual reality of where we are, our actual situation, our grounding, and then posits questions regarding where we might go from there.  She accepts the inevitability of structure and aesthetics, and points out the inevitability of their imminent derailment in her work and life in general.

During the 2009 Transmodern Festival, we invite artists and audience to pay extra attention to extemporaneous conversation.  Feel the form, observe the flow, dwell on the pleasure of conversation.  A medium with incredible immediacy, take liberties, be inventive, and appreciate its power and intricacy.

Below we present two manifestos from Theresa Columbus.  Be sure to be on the look out for her performing in roaming performances over the weekend and during Pedestrian Service Exquisite on Sunday afternoon.

Pleasure Manifesto

Taking your work deadly seriously.  Words as they are not spoken.  Words in conversation. As painfully beautiful, odd and/or fulfilling.  Visuals too.  Sounds too. That art is meant to encase these.  We feel these things together, or individually, and share them.  You can’t read everything.  Friends can discuss these things.

The stage/canvas is a place to explore limits in huge or subtle ways.  Do not be limited by what is considered normal for the stage/canvas.  Of course exploring limits can for real help expansions in tolerance and decency in the world.  Of course it is part of artists’ work to show that limits are often arbitrary and can lose their meaning.

Do the things, seek the people, that give you the drive.  Give togetherness ridiculous amounts of time and planning, also encourage each other to work like crazy.  Align with forces of change and optimism.

Not to be stopped by time!!  Time is totally different for different people on different days.  It can’t sound right, be right sometimes.  It has to continue, be done as it is, poetry makes up the difference!  We need each other, not just confident time managers!

Have mercy on each other, if we are going to fill our world with what is stronger and not just domineering, we need to have endless patience for each others’ little flakiness, little snottiness, too shy and too loud, big sucky feelings.

Joy in politics, I can’t state it overtly, but we know who needs to be heard more, intuitively.  Help those people be heard more and improve their communication; the good work needs to be heard and it is a sin to not hear the good work that is unmade when it just needs the slightest push and desire.  We need to fill our ears and eyes with it, so we need to see that it exists.

Dressing, eating, and creating atmospheres can all be important. Boundaries should be explored.  Ugly and beautiful should be explored:  we are each others’ muses, we feed each other these things, and the present is crucial.

Joy is not frivolous.  Joy and pleasure in improving, every single day, the ability to absorb art, make art, learning to send it out to the world after being fed by it (don’t keep it to yourselves.)

Manifesto for Women helping each other to have fun and make art and things like That
There is something SO BEAUTIFUL about women making each other happy. Because men still get to say more, and women would like to have more of this place in the sun, but we’re just not encouraging each other enough, or else we would make more art and music and get more awesome attention, in community ways and in fame and recognition and all that jazz. It’s so fun to be acknowledged, to be the subject. Ya know that phrase, “You only live once?” Don’t you wanna try being showered in all kinds of attention? At least try?  It is FUN to get recognition. Do it for the young girls! So they too decide to be so immodest as to seek recognition! Of course making art period can be incredibly great, but it helps women want to make art when they see good art made by women out there, and they have other women in their community inspiring them! So we have to, as a group, get better at having fun, and recognize each other’s brilliance and feed it like crazy, even if that just means feeding each other stir fry to give each other time to work on these things. You don’t have to be a lesbian; if you’re not just really try to take care of each other and beef up each other’s egos because then you get the pleasure of listening to someone in addition to the pleasure of supporting someone.

DO NOT EVER GET JEALOUS of each other’s success, or you can feel jealous for a second and then be like, YES! Another brilliant woman actually making stuff and then actually getting noticed and not written off. MORE MORE MORE of this, me too, come on ladies, this is one place where we need to drop all petty competitive tendencies and tendencies to be judgmental just to make ourselves feel better for not making more things, and make our way into the world of art in every way fathomable!! Or be competitive in a good way, she really dedicated herself to that, I can do that! If you don’t like her work, try to be positive with constructive criticism. Again, support directly or indirectly, help each other with art, with getting stuff done and shown, and also, help each other just feel good, massage each other’s necks and shoulders and cook for each other and give each other treats.

Tell each other we’re cute because, believe it or not, there are actually artists that are women who are hung up on their appearance! Isn’t that strange?? That’s sarcastic! Of course there are, because as artists we’re supposed to be extra aware of aesthetics, and we are! So tell each other as much! And besides, we’re women living in this world. And if you’re one of those who isn’t affected by beauty issues, just be nice and tell other ladies who are that they’re pretty, instead of being disgusted by the pettiness of it all. A great way to excel at this is to give each other things to wear (a special thank you to my roomies for these things) which are practically free on half off days if you really look.

It’s not tacky to be a feminist! It can be the most sexy, fun luscious thing in the world. Being on tour and eating breakfast in a diner… yum. Feed each other, pour for each other, juice each other up.