Performance Art

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court entered the debate over government funding of the arts yesterday, agreeing to rule on the constitutionality of a law that bars subsidies for exhibits or performances that are considered indecent.At the center of the dispute is a 7-year-old law that Congress passed because some lawmakers were angry over federal grants for artistic exhibits by Robert Mapplethorpe, who has been condemned for his homoerotic work, and Andres Serrano, who has been accused of blasphemy against Jesus Christ.

Comedian of the operaThis opera isn't over until you laugh at the comedic stylings of B.J. Ward's "Stand-Up Opera," 8 p.m. Saturday at Shriver Hall Auditorium on the Homewood campus of Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles St. Ward has fused opera and comedy with a voice capable of delivering four-octave notes and side-splitting jokes. Tickets cost $16. For more information, call (410) 516-7157.Schuur thingSoak up the velvety smooth sounds of two-time Grammy-winning jazz vocalist Diane Schuur on Saturday at the Gordon Center for Performing Arts, 3506 Gwynnbrook Avenue, Owings Mills.

If Chen and Dancers had not performed in Baltimore last fall, I undoubtedly would have been cheering along with the rest of the Kennedy Center audience after the group's performance Tuesday night at the Terrace Theater.However, Mr. Chen and his troupe of 11 New York-based dancers have undergone several personnel changes that affected the overall quality of their performance. Sadly, the more recent additions to the company were just not up to Mr. Chen's rigorous, open-throttle choreography.

Buried deep in an addendum to the Republican "Contract with America" is a pledge to cut more than $500 million from "all arts and humanities funding" in America in the next five years.And Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich wants to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, among others.But I have a feeling that when all the huffing and puffing is over, Big Bird and Barney will continue to get funded.The NEA, however, may not.And that is because Big Bird and Barney never cut themselves with razor blades, smear themselves with excrement or expose their private parts on stage.

The artist looked at the petite, fair-haired Suzi Keats Sinex and saw Winston Churchill, at least around the mouth. Could be, says Ms. Sinex, board president of Maryland Art Place, stepping back from the freshly painted canvas, contemplating her new image: tough broad with deep brow furrows and fierce determination."

Ever-so-'Queer' performance artFour years ago, Tim Miller made national headlines as one of the "NEA Four" -- a quartet of performance artists denied previously approved grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. The grants were later reinstated -- with damages -- and Miller has subsequently received other grants from the NEA. Tomorrow Baltimoreans can get an idea of the type of work that caused the controversy when Miller performs his one-man show, "My Queer Body," at 9:30 p.m. at Maryland Art Place's 14Karat Cabaret, 218 W. Saratoga St.An explicitly personal monologue that includes full nudity, "My Queer Body" demonstrates "that when you turn the wrath of government on artists, you mostly succeed in firing up their imaginations, emboldening their voices and widening their audiences," according to the San Francisco Examiner.

Five visual-arts exhibitions, a performance-arts series and a film and video series are planned as part of this summer's Artscape, the city's annual celebration of the arts held in the Mount Royal Avenue cultural corridor. This year's festival will run July 15-17.Deadline is Feb. 4 for submitting entries to the visual-arts exhibitions and performance-art series.There are three indoor visual-arts exhibitions. "The Ecstatic Garden of Sublime Delirium," curated by artist Laure Drogoul, will be a series of artists' installations that focus on delirious illusions and ironic and disillusioned visions of utopia.

Two years ago, in the throes of the recession, the suburbs that ring Baltimore cut back or even cut out making their fair share contributions to cultural institutions that are based in the city, but that benefit the whole region.Now, with the economy brighter, many of these suburban governments say they have restored their contributions to the Baltimore attractions that so many of their residents patronize.If only that were the whole truth.County governments have restored some of the cuts they made during the recession, but their contributions still fall way below levels of 1990-92.

Jazz, African dancing, Japanese dance theater and American choral music will be part of ArtSalute, a free multimedia celebration featuring some of the state's finest performing artists Oct. 4 at Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.Organized by Maryland Citizens for the Arts, the statewide arts advocacy organization, ArtSalute will serve as the main event in the state's observance of October as Arts and Humanities Month.ArtSalute performers include jazz saxophonist Gary Bartz, jazz singers Ruby Glover and Nataska Hasan, the Baltimore Choral Arts Society, the Sankofa Dance Theater, Japanese dance theater performer Shizumi and the Salisbury Symphony Orchestra.

A bearded lady who juggles fire, a lesbian dressed as a drag queen and a duo called the Scum Wrenches that specializes in confrontational political performance art. Is this cabaret? Is it comedy? Or on a more basic level, is it art?Baltimore audiences can decide for themselves beginning tonight when the month-long New York-Baltimore New Performance Festival opens with Avant-Garde-Arama, a multi-media showcase from New York's Performance Space 122. In addition to P.S. 122, the festival will highlight work from two other New York experimental venues -- Dixon Place and the Kitchen.

Forget the glitzy attractions along the Harbor East waterfront. If you want a real sense of East Baltimore, check out The Rumors Are True: Megan Hildebrandt & Christine Sajecki, a new exhibit at the Creative Alliance at the Patterson. With paintings, photographs and other media, artists Hildebrandt and Sajecki offer different takes on the same East Baltimore neighborhoods, based on their tenure as resident artists at the Creative Alliance. The result is an endearing and illuminating show - sometimes whimsical, sometimes sobering - that just may tell you more than you ever wanted to know about Charm City (like, what does that roving Tastee Freez truck really deliver at 3 a.m.?

After a long and passionate debate, former Maryland Gov. William Donald Schaefer appears likely to be honored with a prominent statue on Baltimore's Inner Harbor. Few would question the appropriateness of the honor or its location. But the proposal for a Schaefer statue has also performed another service for the city he loves. Questions about where this piece of public art might be located and what it should look like have reaffirmed the pivotal role of the Public Art Commission in these matters - the public's interest can be balanced against those of powerful individuals seeking to impose their view of art on the city.

Nurseryland is in chaos. President Humpty Dumpty has suffered a great fall,and the people of the rhyming country can't reassemble him. Now, they must elect a new commander-in-chief. This is the concept behind Mother Goosed: The Nurseyland Campaign Trails, from Baltimore-based performance art troupe Fluid Movement. The production, with performances this weekend at Riverside Park and next weekend at Patterson Park, pits a red team of swimmers, led by Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater, against a blue team, headed by Jack and Jill, in a zany battle to fill the power vacuum left by the broken egg. The performers of Fluid Movement aren't the only folks parodying this year's presidential election campaign - Jon Stewart is a master at it, and the New Yorker last week weighed in with its satirical cover of the Obamas terrorizing the White House.

Standing at the corner of Maryland and North avenues, Megan Hildebrandt trained her tiny video camera on the passing pedestrians. "I'm trying to make you feel safe and secure," she spouted yesterday in a mildly creepy way. "You're under my watchful gaze. I'm on every street corner." Her outfit completed the project: The 23-year-old performance artist wore a helmet with a blinking blue light, an oversized "Believe" sticker and a Baltimore police shield. Hildebrandt's turn as the human embodiment of the city Police Department's surveillance cameras was part of the fifth annual Transmodern Festival - the Baltimore art community's showcase of experimental theater, nontraditional creations and performance installations.

To those who insist the exhibition installed in Mount Vernon Place by students at the Maryland Institute College of Art is not really art, I can only say that all art is about ideas, particularly the art of today. In the past, art was easy to recognize because it almost always took the form of an image: The Venus de Milo is a representation of ideal beauty, just as a Raphael Madonna encodes a complex religious theology. These images are beautiful to look at, but we understand them most deeply in terms of the ideas they represent.

Greggy Glitterati, Fluid Movement's own talent agent for the underrepresented, has always felt that Baltimore's local talent is plentiful, just not accessible. This weekend, though, Glitterati has taken it upon himself to present outrageous local talent for all to see at his talent and variety extravaganza, Glitterama! Glitterama! ... Glitterama! Greggy Glitterati is just one of the quirky theatrical characters born out of Baltimore's Fluid Movement, a community- based performance art group that formed in 1998 to give people outlets to perform in unconventional spaces and ways.

Ana Mendieta left her mark on the art world of the 1970s and '80s by pressing her naked body into the earth, by covering it with feathers and mud and filming it, by carving its imprint into trees and rocks and setting them afire. Her art was a continual exploration of the most primal means of mark-making possible using the most primal materials imaginable - earth, water, fire; flesh, blood and bone - to record her oh-so-brief but prolific passage through this world as a woman and as an artist.

Kneeling beneath the vaulted ceiling of the Evergreen House's historic Bakst Theatre, Laure Drogoul is a study in messy elegance. Her sandy gray hair is tumbling from a pencil-fastened pile, and she's firing instructions, ideas and an occasional flash of scatter-brained quirkiness into the hollow space. A Delightful Evening of Remarkable Performance, a cabaret-style show scheduled for 8 tonight, is Drogoul's first ever at the Bakst and the reason for her chaotic state. "This will be a collaborative performance," she says.

There are enough visions of hell on display at the American Visionary Art Museum to disturb your sleep for years. In the painting "Officers' Club," Polish-born Irving Norman creates a smoke-filled cocktail lounge populated by the Nazi elite. SS officers painted in a hyper-realistic style seem simultaneously skeletal and mechanical as they play cards and order drinks from a waitress wearing a collar. Frenchman Francis Marshall uses cast-off stockings, human hair and rope to personify war with misshapen, life-size dolls lashed to wooden chairs.

Philadelphia has a concentration of "gentlemen's clubs" that tend to dominate the billboard advertising leading into the city. While these clubs (strip joints, actually) are a major part of the city's nightlife, there are plenty of offerings for those seeking more mainstream activities in the evening. Options range from theater to performance art to dance clubs. A good way to find out what's going on when you plan to visit is to check out the entertainment section of www.philly.com, which lists reviews, clubs, concerts, theaters and more.