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player ready...Pablo Helguera calls his new work, “Jurua,” a playformance.
And just what the heck is that?
“It’s a play written by a performance artist,” says Helguera, who identifies himself as a performance artist and is quick to add that he has no training in dramaturgy or theatrical direction. “For me, `Jurua’ is an investigation of where these two genres meet.”
“Jurua” opens Friday and Saturday as part of the Blue Rider Theater’s never-ending Sexfest and replays Dec. 5 and 6 at Randolph Street Gallery.
Performance art and theater may not seem too far apart: Both are live, public spectacles. But the sensibilities are actually quite different. In theater, actors play characters wholly apart from themselves; in performance, the artist plays herself, or a persona based on herself. In theater, the audience is expected to suspend disbelief — to go to Oz, if that’s what the script demands. But in performance, everybody’s in on the joke; there’s no “fourth wall.”
“My original idea was to have two actors and two performance artists on stage,” says Helguera, who has studied performance and painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and in Barcelona. “What if you had contrasting moments, say, a very campy actor doing a very recognizable character, and a person interacting with that actor who became engaged in more intimate, more performative rituals?”
For Helguera, “Jurua” is a necessary antidote to a piece he did last winter called “The Palace (and other Pilsen Ghost Stories).” Though the piece got great reviews and drew large audiences, Helguera needed to exorcise some of the personal demons stirred up by it.
One of the questions raised by “The Palace” was precisely that of Helguera’s artistic identity.
“What I write, what I paint, even what I do at the museum” — Helguera works in the education department at the Museum of Contemporary Art — “they’re all the things I believe in, my obsessions, my interests. I’m not creating a new medium. But, for me, everything’s connected.”
And besides, Helguera insists, this matter of labels and categories is, well, hardly new.
“When people said to Unamuno, `This is not a novel,’ he said, `Well, you’re right, it’s a nevola,’ ” he says. “I mean, categories are meaningless. That’s the spirit of `Jurua.’ It really shouldn’t matter what it is to people who come see it.”
Those who pay the ticket price will find a story about blunted desire. Taking place in the 1920s in Brazil, “Jurua” is part “Fitzcarraldo,” part camp, part history, part poetry too.
“I needed to get completely away from a specific history, to find a distant and exotic location that in some way I could relate to,” he says. “So I decided on the Amazon. I’ve never been to the Amazon, never been to Brazil. If someone came to see `Jurua’ who’s from the Amazon, they would not recognize it, because this is an Amazon of the imagination.”
Whereas in “The Palace” Helguera worked with historical facts, in “Jurua” history is turned on its head.
“The piece is about how you fall into your dreams and then fall out of them,” he says. “It’s questioning what really motivates us to act and ultimately to create. For example, a lot of things that happen to the character I do evolve directly from the process of creating the piece — that’s very performance art, of course.”
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John Travolta’s doodle is pretty sketchy: thin lines, apparently drawn on the fly, of what may or may not be him in a plane seat. Who knows? It’s a star doodle, a celebrity drawing, not a masterpiece, donated by Travolta for this weekend’s Doodles by the Stars auction at Live Bait Theater.
The annual fundraiser also includes work by Joan Baez (a beautifully fleshed out, 1960s hippie-style guitar), Al Franken (a map of the U.S., with apologies to Florida), and self-portraits by a mess of folks.
Others who’ve donated doodles include Eric Bogosian, Dixie Carter, Andy Garcia, John Lithgow, Bebe Neuwirth, Al Pacino, Debra Winger, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman, Whoopi Goldberg, Tracey Ullman, Lynda Barry, Armistead Maupin, Anne Rice and the late Robert Mitchum.
You can have any of those drawings — just bid high and help keep Live Bait alive.
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the facts
Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m, “Jurua,” by Pablo Helguera, Blue Rider Theater, 1822 S. Halsted St. Call 312-733-4668. Blue Rider is wheelchair accessible.
Sunday, 7 p.m., benefit auction, Live Bait Theater, 3914 N. Clark St. Call 773-871-1212 for more information. Live Bait is wheelchair accessible.