Talent can be found almost everywhere you look around the Scenic City
Novelist and poet Stephen Crane wrote, “Tradition, thou art for suckling children, Thou art the enlivening milk for babes; But no meat for men is in thee.” Tradition has its purpose, sure, but to grow, we must break from tradition.
While any week in Chattanooga offers a variety of music, theater and dance performances, the broad category named “non-traditional performance” just for the sake of this article includes the overlooked and often misunderstood and/or maligned realms of performance art and improvisational theater, which can bear genuinely unique and unexpected experiences.
Multidisciplinary artist Eleanor Epstein broadcast the second of two different performance pieces at Swine Gallery (relocated this year to errSpace at the Palace Picture House) last year from a remote location, with Epstein sitting and reading at a Parisian-style table in a grove.
“I started ripping my dress up and hanging it on the fence behind me,” said Epstein via email. “In the end, it looked like an abstract painting.”
“My work exists mainly in the experiential field,” said Epstein. “I studied small-scale sculpture and metalsmithing at RISD so that I could make objects that could then be interacted with while filmed, or in a gallery, or on the street.”
“My goal is to give the viewer a glimpse into my surreal, dreamlike mind and see another reality,” said Epstein, who is currently working with partner Elliot Worth on a film, described as “Southern mysticism mixed with David Lynch.”
Swine Gallery and errSpace curator Aaron Cowan works in both sculpture and performance art, and one of his most memorable and visually arresting performances was at Barking Legs Theater.Cowan took long pieces of wood, poked them through his clothing and attached them using power tools, entangling himself in a human-sized sculpture from which he had to escape.
“It’s a relatively young medium when compared with painting or sculpture, but it has a rich history and a lot of freedom,” said Cowan via email, about performance art.
“My medium of choice is hair, both human and artificial,” said Chloe George via email, who started experimenting with performance art while in UTC’s Painting and Drawing program. “I am fascinated by how the human reaction to hair shifts from attraction to repulsion when the hair is cast off of the body, and I explore this reaction within my work.”
In one of George’s performances, she wore a floor-length wig and braided it to the sound of hair-product commercials.
“I wanted the audience to recognize the value that we place on hair as a symbol of beauty by having them focus on me carefully braiding it, but then making all of that effort pointless by cutting it off,” said George.
Taking inspiration from the Dada and Fluxus movements, the monthly Fluxuswalk defies the typical artist/audience setup and fixed location of a performance.
“The Fluxuswalk is just a way of noticing things you might not otherwise notice, and wandering for the sake of exploring, in a way that doesn’t have any particular point or destination,” said the Fluxuswalk organizers via email, using the pseudonyms “Rrose Selavy” and “R. Mutt” as a nod to Marcel Duchamp.
Participants have found themselves singing, getting stuck in construction areas, using a deck of cards to determine destinations and poking around warehouses.
“You don’t need to have a plan,” said the organizers. “We figure it out as we go.”
On that note, this article about “non-traditional performance” moves into the area of improvisational comedy, represented by Improv Chattanooga and its new home, First Draft Theater.“We literally went from four shows a month to four shows a week,” said Steven Disbrow, who formed Improv Chattanooga with Kevin Bartolomucci.
“It’s not just ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’” said Sean Phipps, one of the twenty current cast members of Improv Chattanooga. “It really is an art form.”
“We have a lot of fun up here, but there’s a method to the madness,” said Phipps. “It’s not just getting up here and telling jokes. There’s a lot of trust involved.”
While in stand-up comedy, the emphasis is on jokes and punchlines, with improv comedy, “It’s mostly just relationships; people interacting with each other,” said Bartolomucci.
In addition to short form and long form improv showcases, Improv Chattanooga began “Nooga! The Improvised Soap Opera” on August 5, which unfolds over a total of 16 consecutive Saturdays.
“We have certain things we’d like to get to, certain tropes, and if we get there, cool, we’re ready for it,” said Bartolomucci. “But if we don’t get there and something else is created—and that’s the beauty of improv—nine times out of ten, the unknown is way better than the known.”