by Courtenay Nearburg

We look to performance art to break the rules, to present the taboo, to stretch the boundaries of contemporary theatre and performance. However, all too often, the desire to create something out of bounds results in rather weak presentation of vague and bizarre material with no meaning, save for the creator. This is not the case with New York artist Heather Woodbury. She doesn't just break the rules, she invents new ones.

On a dare, Woodbury created 20 hours of material over a period of nine months. The birth of the performance novel, a novel idea in stage performance that has put Woodbury in the spotlight of alternative theatre, a relatively incredible accomplishment considering that perhaps only two or three other performance artists have earned the recognition of the mainstream press and theatre communities. Laurie Anderson, perhaps the best known of these artists, has invited Woodbury to take What Ever: An American Odyssey in 8 Acts to Europe this summer, for what may become the beginning of a world tour for the unique show. Adaptation of What Ever for radio is in progress, and Woodbury would even like to see it presented on television, the nemesis of performance artists everywhere. No wonder she calls herself a philistine.

But what is What Ever? Well, it's a one-woman show consisting of eight episodes and over 100 characters, presented in a marathon session of two episodes per night over four nights. It might sound like an ingenious way to earn a lot more money, sucking people into more than one show a weekend, but it could only backfire if each episode were not capable of standing alone, and if the story were not good enough to entice the audience into another night of visitation. But Woodbury's characters are rich and inviting, comic and poignant, and she is earning devotees every step of the way. After the culmination of the nine month installment in a bar in New York City, The Heather Woodbury Report had attracted writers from the Village Voice and the New York Times, and artists like Anderson and Johnny Depp. Audiences loved the serial nature of the show, and despite the exhaustive process of writing and rehearsing new episodes each week, Woodbury found herself caught up in the lives of her characters, and allowed them to develop and grow with the show, as shadows of herself.

"The characters were my palette. The story was created impromptu, and it is really a mockery of myself, topically speaking. I really like working improvisationally, there's so much possibility in it. I would write each week, then rehearse up until the night of the show, then sometimes do what I call on-stage rewrites, just feeling how it's working, and changing it if something came to mind that flowed better," Woodbury says.

Woodbury has been a performance artist for 13 years in New York City. A dedicated performer, she got her start in Berkeley, California, where she was raised by middle-class bohemian parents. " 'A little too bohemian to be middle-class, a little too middle-class to be bohemian,' my mother is fond of saying," she says of her upbringing, during which she decided unequivocally at age 7 that she would be a writer. When a friend's mother encouraged her to take an acting class when she was 11, she wasn't interested. But she was convinced finally and signed up for Robin Roof's Young Actor's Performance Workshop, where she fell in love with theatre and particularly improvisation.

"She had us doing a lot of improvisation, and then comedie de l'arte, really. It was comedie de l'arte definitely, using a lot of stock characters and scenarios that she would create for us to perform," Woodbury says of her training. Her fascination with improvisation led her to study the history of performance art, including the work of Marcel Duchamp. Her tastes in performance became specialized. "Theatre bored me. I mean, the fourth wall. What's the point? I find it very oppressive. My problem with theatre is that it portrays reality rather than lives it."

But performance art, that was human, lively and engrossing. "It's incendiary. Not meant to be repeated," Woodbury explains.

By May 1995, her nine month gig at the bar had ended, bringing her to a deadline for a grant she had received from Franklin Furnace to create a performance piece called Ecstatic Woman. She took material from the Report and reworked it for the grant. "It became ecstatic man, woman, and poodle," she says laughing. Immediately after that performance, the formidable Performance Space 122 had commissioned Woodbury to present the Report in the current eight episode format, which required an immense amount of editing and rehearsing by Woodbury and her director and collaborator Duncan. In this form, the Report became the performance novel. "It's like the story around the campfire. It's packaged succinct entertainment, like TV. Television replicates ritual in the 20th century. The family gathers and participates every day," Woodbury says, adding that she believes TV would be the ultimate place for her piece.

"It's like Maupan's Tales of the City. It's definitely a mini-series," she explains, discussing plans for the audio tapes that are to be tailored for radio play. "I would like to see actors playing the characters. There are things a young man could bring to the characterization of Skeeter that I could never do."

Woodbury's characterizations are certainly rich, including two female nubiles, Clove and Sable, the young man caught between them, Skeeter; his mother, a forty-something New Age witch, Linda, and her chain-smoking sister, who is having an affair with a retired CEO, Paul, recently divorced from environmentalist Sheila's mother, who left Paul for the black gardener, and so on. Probably one of the most delightful of characters is Violet, the aged New York bohemian socialite, accompanied by her faithful poodle Balzac; and perhaps the most poignant is Bushy, the Irish lesbian prostitute in love with her best friend, Magenta Rush, in Hell's Kitchen.

"This is not a fantasy, it's magic. I do believe in the miraculous in life, and most certainly in art. New Yorkers are so full of jaundice and cynicism. It's really provincial, even. It can be a flattened, clenched reality, that modern theatre tends to portray. This is a magic realist novel," Woodbury says.

"I love the 19th century. Particularly Latin American fiction of the late 19th and early 20th century. There's the element of the fantastic, the mystical. I like a happy ending," Woodbury says.

What Ever is a study of language, and Woodbury's considerable skills as a writer shine through the dialogue between the various characters. If anything, the language is the star of the show. She is fascinated by the bardist tradition, the oral and aural traditions of Celtic storytelling. "I love the Shakespaeran conceit. Using rhyme to convey an altered state of reality or presence in a magical realm. It hard to tell with Clove, whether she is on extasy or if she is ecstatic..."

Woodbury claims her youth on the West Coast built in an appreciation of the "West Coast stoner eloquence" as almost Elizabethan, and that black urban dialect fascinates her as well, that it is almost archaic in its tradition and amazing in its development as it's own language. Her own experiences at a rave in Santa Cruz on the beach, a cross-country jaunt on the Green Tortoise hippie bus, and her 17-year old niece combined to help her create characters like rave queens Clove and Sable, and their Romeo, Skeeter. But Woodbury is not a raver, although she describes her first and only experience with the rave as transcendentally important. She is a jazz fan, listening to WKCR, Columbia University's radio station. What Ever is a jazz jam; the characters are instruments creating a melody of universal and benevolent truths about life and the ever-changing rhythm of living.

"I love jazz players' courtly and articulate manner. Sammy is based on my friend CJ, a bongo player who taught James Dean how to play bongos. When I lived in Hell's Kitchen, I lived in Manhatten Plaza, a sort of artist slum. There were these 3 guys who held forth there, commenting all the time on the coming and going of all the young artists, and I loved their conversation. All the stories they had to tell. And CJ did have love affairs with women like Violet, upper class white bohemians who were so romanced by jazz in that age. It was a case of sympathy between subcultures, and I am very interested in that. Different types of people coming together," Woodbury says.

Violet represents a certain kind of woman who inspires awe with her connosieur's knowledge of jazz and art, her independence and yet, anonymity, as the patron and not the artist. She represents women who had a free life, depending on their husbands for identity, for money and class, but who could have been influential artists in their own right. All the things that could be, but couldn't because of the roles women were expected to play.

"There used to be all-girl swing bands in the forties, when the men were away at war. That's the poignancy in Violet. When she talks of the kind of artist she would have been, she talks of creating a room that doesn't just hold jazz, but that actually is jazz. She had considerable talent, but no outlet in which to express it, save appreciation," says Woodbury.

The characters in What Ever find relief in the voice of despair, and hence the appearance of Cobain, the Friendly Ghost, who visits with Violet and haunts Clove. According to Woodbury, Kurt Cobain is a "psychic vessel" for the frustration of youth, and the perfect voice for the deification of youth that is so prevalent in society. "I was profoundly affected by the deaths of Cobain and River Phoenix. Is this to say, this is what happens to our best and brightest in today's world? They can't handle it because it's too much for them, their sensitivity gives way?" she asks. "It's the exorcising of the wounded male. Cobain created melodies that heal and resurrect. And yet, he could not heal himself."

Woodbury is following her dream, like Clove. In her own words, she has created a minimalist epic; thus, an American Odyssey. She enriches the tradition of theatre with a new conceptualization of performance, the serial performance novel. What can be next? Why, a Broadway play, of course. "It's a deconstructionist South Pacific in the grand tradition of Broadway musicals, with a contemporary twist. There's a Terrence McKenna-like character, a female surfing champion, and lots of indigineous people. I don't want to talk about it, because if you talk about something too much, it takes the place of doing it," she says. Somehow, that doesn't seem to be a problem for Heather Woodbury.