cris cheek Explains It All

Sometimes a lead-up to an interview is just as interesting as the conversation itself, and we certainly have a case in point! cris cheek—poet, interdisciplinary performer and Associate Professor in the Department of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio—has given a lengthy and durable interview at Chris Goode's Thompson's Bank of Communicable Desire. Goode relates a semi-violent interchange with cheek before the debut of cheek's performance collage Mixed Ape ("which stacked up poems, performance texts, instruction pieces, artists' writings, Fluxus compositions, computer-generated prose, queer burbles and transcribed vocal improvisations"):

Well, so, anyway, cris, as he's inclined to do, gave me a pre-show good-luck bearhug, in the commission of which the zip of his fleece lacerated my lip, and I started the performance a few minutes late and still bleeding slightly. This may or may not be a good anecdote in itself, but it's certainly The Little Metaphor That Could. cris cheek, it could be argued, is to "cut lip" as the genius queer novelist Tom Spanbauer is to "burnt tongue". Here, Spanbauer's protégé Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club et al) defines the "burnt tongue" technique as it's taught in Spanbauer's famous 'Dangerous Writing' workshops:

A way of saying something, but saying it wrong, twisting it to slow down the reader. Forcing the reader to read close, maybe read twice, not just skim along a surface of abstract images...
from an L.A. Weekly article on Amy Hempel

Actually, though the "saying it wrong" part fits nicely, cheek might also be rather at home with abstract images and surface-skimming: without Spanbauer's devotion to narrative to service, a kind of omnidirectional mobility becomes not only possible but desirable. cheek's work often records the patterns and instants of real liveness, the extemporised, the dependent: but the pressures of time and space are repeatedly folded, spindled, mutilated, into a multiplicity that granulates, often finally liquefying altogether. Again, this is often mistaken for a pomo (porno?) inattentivity, an unwillingness to engage with historic conditions and named names: whereas in fact cheek is actually seeking new surfaces, new multidimensional jotters, on which to capture at a radical level of decentred fidelity the movements of voice across social distances, as they happen now, and as they may or may not continue to happen in the panoply of potential futures that every furiously heterogeneous 'now' contains.

The interview itself covers "[t]heatre, art, poetry, music, London, the weather, airports, sudden fury, different music, still not cutting down on sugary snacks, film, horses, people doing sin, incidents, refractions, the entire dark dream outside." Italics represent the Chris Goode bits, with cheek replying in roman. Regarding the first topic:

[laughs] Yeah! So we were just talking a little bit about... We were touching in with some work I suppose in a... if we’re going to be coarse about it, a sort of poetry frame, that does play with, um..., artifice and possibly with kind of confected voices...

Yeah. Good word. Did you say ‘cathected’ or ‘confected’?

Confected.

You did say ‘confected’.

...And [poetic] work that seems in some ways anyway energised by some of the things that, when you see them in a theatre context, you feel a bit allergic to. So is it about what you’re asked to do in a theatre as a kind of a... So I know Charles Bernstein, for example, made this distinction – I don’t know whether it was specifically in relation to you and your work, but – making a distinction between an active audience and a consuming audience.... So is there a thing about being asked in a theatre to be a consumer, who has nothing less to do? There’s that thing you quoted from James Yarker...

Um... Well maybe what you’re saying is what I think. But I’m going to try and come at it another way. Which is that when I see, for example, the poet holding – not always, but mostly – something, or in some relation to a sense that there’s a text that they’re looking at, and that they’re navigating live for me, I feel much more compelled into the moment than I do, generally, when somebody has memorized a bunch of lines and is pretending to be somebody else. If it’s the poet on stage I feel that they’re doing something that has a... Yeah, maybe we’re going to get to the nature of the definition of task. There’s a certain kind of task going on, which is, they’re trying to bring that text to me. And so there’s all the stuff, that you get with a musician too, of the edges of improvisation. There’s always these micro-edges of improvisation. Whereas what I tend to feel with somebody who’s learned something by rote, and maybe is not so brilliant at what they’re doing, they don’t particularly embody it, they don’t really give you very much... I mean I’m not into the whole sort of, er, problem of somebody not having a clear idea of what their motivation is on stage. I don’t mean to go there. But there’s no sense of them just being there.

OK, so Jackson Mac Low, one of the wonderful conversations I had with him was about The Marrying Maiden, which was a text that he wrote for the Living Theatre in, I don’t know, ’65 or so. I think they performed it every night for something like six months in New York. When you look at the text, it’s a mania of instruction. So there’s almost a different instruction after every single word. That you’re supposed to say this word as if you’ve just been goosed, and you’re supposed to say that word as if, er..., you’ve just seen a goose, and you’re supposed to say the following word as if you are a goose, or whatever. It’s not that funny, actually! But it’s that kind of thing. Now I said to Jackson, that’s impossible! And he just started to cackle. And he said, Yeah, you know, what I found is that I could arrive at indeterminacy through overdetermination.

cheek is in constant engagement with art and music, referring to Steve Lacy, Jackson MacLow, Sally Potter, Geraldine Monk, Bill Griffiths, and even someone named Steve Cripps, who cheek explains as "a pyrotechnic sculptor who did some of the more beautiful pieces of that period of time. He would do solos with a clarinet in one hand and a blowtorch in the other." Later, cheek visits the concept of community:

I was just thinking, OK, so, is the poem – let’s say more generally – is the poem – OK, you’re going to say theatre, I know! – is it a place where... (I was thinking about it in terms of poetry because it’s not the way that people normally think about poetry.) ...Is the poem a place where some form of community is being modelled? Albeit utterly provisional. Maybe just in the moment of one reader reading that thing in a book, you know, under their pillow with a torch. Is there a provisional moment of community there?

And so I just was interested in that question, and I thought, OK, well if it could be staged as a question – it’s not normally how people think about the experience of poetry, particularly if we’re looking at polyvocal poems, poems which were deliberately written to be performed by at least more than one voice, but I think it gets more interesting once you get beyond two, actually – is there some kind of instantiation of community there? And of course there’s an instantiation of community in the event of that being witnessed by other people. Because you have that community of the witnesses; you have the community of them if you enlarge them out in terms of the effect of the observers on the observed – from anthropology you have that community of kind of witness-participants they become, in a way; and then you have the community of the people who are experiencing being the foregrounded community... (You get the stupidity of the complexity of these kinds of formulations!) And then the whole event.

And I was thinking, OK, so lots of people I know, in all sorts of different walks of life, and [of] all sorts of different political persuasions, are talking about group formation, community formation, ideas about neighbourhoods – but particularly about what community is. Because it’s been such a nebulously used word, really. “I’m going back to my community.” “I live in a community.”

And so I was interested in revisiting those texts – both looking at them and talking about them, and doing them, and also thinking, particularly, is that dead? Was that a moment that was an utterly utopian moment that’s connected up to the liberatory politics of the 1960s, broadly speaking – dialectics of liberation and all that stuff; or, is it something that’s worth another go? And if it is worth another go, then maybe it does begin to become very much more connected with theatre. In which case I’d be very interested in theatre again!

...And the sense that something gets carried from that, by word of mouth and reportage on the events, into other moments of community formation, and blogs and lists and other kinds of community, these mixed realities that we’re all living in; and then also that people would make works in response to that experience, and so forth. So I just wondered if there was something there. ...I have no idea, actually.

And then I was also very interested in highly scripted things like Hannah Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journal. I mean it’s highly scripted and highly rehearsed. What kind of community is that? That poses a very awkward question, and a very interesting question in relation to theatre too, which is something that we were harping on earlier, which is that if the community that’s being modelled on the stage is highly scripted, highly controlled, highly rehearsed, then how does anybody else jump in and take part in it? Does it exclude by nature of all sorts of skill bases, for example – let alone anything else?

Light a torch under your pillow and read the entire interview, complete with notes and "critically enlivened" by Joe Milutis, who helped to upload videos of cheek performing, here. Image at top is, from left to right: cris cheek, Bob Cobbing, Bill Griffiths, Jeremy Adler, in Canada, c. 1977.